When testing is not objective

From TechWorld

What a coincidence, you say, that three groups of people decided to test the same products – anti-phishing toolbars – at the same time. None of it. Phishing is high on the hype-meter these days, and anti-phishing is a selling point for the two new browsers – Explorer 7 and Firefox 2. It makes good sense then to run these tests covering every product in the market.

And that is what one group did. Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh tested all the main products and came to an extremely important conclusion: none of them were particularly good and they were all much of a muchness.

Compare that to the conclusion drawn by 3Sharp in its tests however. It concluded that there was a winner. One that was better than the others. And it was Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

There was also a winner in SmartWare’s tests. It wanted to make sure you knew that you are best protected from scam websites by Firefox. Firefox is best. Use Firefox.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that has worked in the IT press for long enough that the first survey was independent and that the second two were “sponsored surveys”. Sponsored by who? Why, by Microsoft and Mozilla respectively, of course.

The audacity of companies in trying to pull this sort of cheap manipulation is staggering, and it is getting worse as time goes on. There is now some bland kind of acceptance that such surveys, even though they are sponsored by the company that always “wins”, are still valid.

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