You Don’t Need To Lie To Sell Products | Hacker News Reader

You Don’t Need To Lie To Sell Products

manyniches.com

7 pointsjohns23 comments

If you are selling anything you want to do repeat business on, lying will make it much harder if not impossible.

The best product managers and salespeople I know will advocate the hell out of their products but will not lie. I have seen customers ask for product managers by name every time they call to buy a new version or product and sometimes go with a product that has less features than the competition because they know the person they are dealing with is honest.

More to the point of TFA, it is true that Apple's hardware prices are very high. However I have never seen a kernel panic screen on my Mac for the past year that I have used it (really used it).

When we assert Apple's hardware prices are higher than PC prices, we can avoid a long and tedious argument by citing the vendor, configuration, and price that we're pitting against the current Macbook. That would also result in a number (an "Apple tax"), instead of a naked assertion.

Well, personally I believe the higher prices are well worth the cost. Someone I know sums it up best: "Macs cost more only if you value your time at zero".

But I agree with your call for specifics. For eg 4 GB DD3 Ram for Macs at Apple is $200 [1] vs at Amazon (random pick) is $78 [2]

[1] http://store.apple.com/us/memorymodel/ME_13_2_4_MB

[2] http://www.amazon.com/CORSAIR-PC3-10666-1333MHz-240-pin-Chan...

You're pricing RAM, not systems. If you're going to buy RAM for a Macbook or a PC, you're going to use the same sources and pay the same prices. Nobody who actually buys their own memory buys it from Apple.

A Dell Inspiron with the same specs as the white Macbook (with an upgraded hard drive) costs $700 compared to $1100. That's a specific comparison purely on hardware.

Well, he had a viable argument until he got to the "no viruses" part. Then his argument turned into a morality play. Poof, there goes his credibility. Apple wins again!

Unfortunately for this person, most normal users will see more crashes (ie, very few) on Win32 than they will (ie, none) on OS X. That's because 99.999999% of Apple users will never load non-Apple code into their kernel, whereas OEMs will load code into Win32 kernels. If you were going to make a recommendation based on reliability to your non-computer-expert grandfather, you'd go with Apple.

Also: these commercials are funny.

Agree many of the commercials are funny. To be clear...I bought Macbooks for myself and my wife in 2006 because I was tired of being XP support for her and her IBM laptop. Her Macbook regularly kernal panics. Sometimes when trying to connect to Timemachine, sometimes when Firefox absorbs too much memory.

The BSOD is not a thing of the past, but is drastically reduced since Vista SP1, and I haven't seen one in RC candidate of Win7, though we've only had that for a little bit. I was running build 7000 of Win7 on a netbook since it went up, and had no problems.

I love my Apple products. I would love for them to focus on the doing of cool things and less on things that could be refutted. Great example of this from MSFT - why are you showing me an ad with a woman looking to do video editing. That felt like a pretty false premise, considering what you get natively with OS X.

I've had three experiences with Macbooks that panicked more than once. Once, I had a funky VPN kernel module installed. The other two times we replaced the memory and solved the problem.

Of course Macbooks can crash. There's very little Apple can do about defective parts and physical damage, other than to very effectively service their gear, which is something no PC OEM has figured out how to do.

Macs have an intrinsic reliability advantage over PCs. It isn't that their OS is more reliable --- it isn't; in fact, even inside the kernel, Win32 is more resilient than OS X. It's that for 99% of its users, Apple is the sole supplier of both hardware and system software.

Within the OS architecture that OS X and Win32 share (monolithic kernels with driver code running as native unverified instructions in ring zero), and given the current state of the art, there is nothing Microsoft can do to negate that advantage. The only thing that can happen is for Apple to fuck it up, by sourcing crappier parts than the average PC OEM (not happening), or by providing poorer support than the average PC OEM (not happening).

Sorry. I don't think these commercials are lying, even though the comparison isn't "fair" to Microsoft.

These are great points, and your analysis is sound. I am giving an emotional response to a commercial, which, unfortunately, is how advertising works. People will emotionally respond to Apple consistently saying their machines don't crash. I'm not suggesting Windows never crashes, but don't make claims that aren't true. This is why I would prefer they stay off the slippery slope of "what is lying anyway" and instead focus on tangible, measurable data about what you can do with the product and platform. If the notion of "what is a crash" becomes a subjective one, it's hard to buy into a large marketing campaign predicated on it. Just my humble opinion...

How about editing your post to say, "Nothing I wrote here is true, but it's how this commercial made me feel". Because from where I stand, except for Apple's high memory prices (which... aren't germane to the commercial), none of what you wrote is true.

There's only incentive to be honest and accurate in your advertising when your potential customers have the wherewithal to tell the difference. Economists have studied this in terms of online dating and used car sales.

I love the comparison to online datnig and usad car salesman...that's not what I want to think of when I think of Apple products.

I'm talking on the level of game dynamics and what economists have studied. I think you're talking on the level of joe-sixpack's emotional associations with those examples.

No thanks. I want the discussion on the level of the former.

My emotional associations with economists are more positive than my emotional associations with Joe Sixpack, so I will assume your argument is correct.

It's not an argument. It's a mention of something I saw in passing which might be of interest. Thanks for revealing your unspoken biases and proclivity to prejudge.

As it happens, I have 3 Macs and an iPhone.

Put another way, there is incentive to be honest and accurate in your advertising unless you think of yourself as very similar to a used-car salesman or someone who regularly lies on online dating sites.

I'm a little sick of the Mac/PC geek stereotypes.

Here's another promo that features a radically different geek type.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgNyoxpENXc

The virus thing is getting a little old, five words sum it up to joe sixpack, although he sometimes has to take a couple minutes to think about it till he fully gets it.

"Ever heard of dodo flu?"

(I guess it should be tasmanian tiger flu or something? eh)

This argument doesn't mean anything. Who cares why Mac users don't have to worry about viruses? They don't. Houses in Kenilworth, IL have a lot less to worry about from crime than do houses in the Edgewater neighborhood in Chicago, but that's not because the houses themselves are intrinsically more secure. Would you argue someone should move to Edgewater instead of Kenilworth if they're worried about crime?

I'd argue that a fortress in Edgewater has less to worry about than a thatched hut in Kenilworth, especially if the socioeconomic situations of the areas in question is about to be reversed.

Keep in mind, if Mac OS X ever does become the dominant player, it will be targeted by the same people currently targeting windows, I'm totally unbiased on this issue, I use linux almost exclusively, neither of these eventualities has any effect on me, it's simply a statement of fact.

If OS X ever does win it's going to have to deal with the exact same set of enemies as windows currently does.

But when that happens surely we'll be better off right because the OS X codebase is more inherently secure than windows? right? right?

Pwn2own, how did that go down again.

Hmm.

So you would recommend that someone move to a fortified house in a high-crime neighborhood, as opposed to a nice house in a rich suburb, so that they'd be less exposed to crime.

Then you back that argument up by repeating my argument.

Glad we're on the same page.

I'm saying the metaphor doesn't really work, when you're discussing the vulnerability of an operating system on the internet, you're talking about a security system exposing an attack surface to a potential intruder with exactly equal opportunity for exploitation, it doesn't take me any more effort to attack the guy at 203.2.193.124 than the guy at 203.2.192.124. So the question has to be how secure is the actual system on the other end? If the vast majority of computers currently run windows, it makes sense from a criminal perspective to target the weakest link, and thus the reason we have the massive proliferation of windows viruses vs the "did it to prove it could be done" proliferation of Linux or OS X based viruses.

I think you already know all this but are just trying to be difficult. This is the typical response from a mac fan.

bravo

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