rcd@nbires.UUCP.UUCP (05/17/86)
Followups to Gilmore's "xeroX slime" posting have run the gamut from speculation on how the Xerox ads might be construed as correct to outright attacks that bear almost no relation to the subject at hand. I think we can get some lessons from a recent one, excerpted here. It seems to be attributed to "Deutsch.pa@XEROX.COM", although the header may have been flipped around by the time we got it. > Xerox has no monopoly on advertising that puts them in the best > possible light... The issue is not whether Xerox puts themselves in the best possible light (which, if done honestly, is only reasonable), but whether they made substantive misstatements. If they did, they may not be alone BUT THEY ARE STILL WRONG to do it. > ...Sun Microsystems, for example, has been widely touting (even > long before delivery) a networked file system that does not work > reliably enough to support serious software development... ...In > all fairness, they have been quite cooperative...once we had done > everything but hit them over the head with a 2-by-4 to convince > them... Yet he said he wasn't "picking on Sun". Is it just coincidence that Sun was chosen as the example here, when Gilmore, who wrote the article attacking the Xerox ad, had been with Sun and heavily involved in their product line? > ...The Xerox Star was out there in the market around the time Andy > Bechtolsheim was building his first Sun boards at Stanford... And we're still not picking on Sun? What does this have to do with the current Xerox ad, which wasn't advertising the Star anyway (as far as we've been told)? > ...(I won't offer my opinion on the ethics of starting a company > that asserts proprietary rights over artifacts developed at a > university.) But you just did offer an opinion--only by innuendo instead of in forth- right fashion. What is this--some Stanford internecine squabble finding its way into a technical newsgroup? And are we STILL not picking on SUN? > ...Let's not quibble over whether a detail or two in an ad 5 years > later is accurate. Nobody in this business has their nose entirely > clean. The ad was in the April, 1986 issue of Byte, advertising a recent product. 5 years has nothing to do with it. The issues raised were not details; they were major claims. But the final objection is to the last statement and what it implies: "Nobody has their (sic) nose clean." Unfortunately true--that's why we complain when it gets out of hand. If people DON'T complain about bad advertising, it's only going to get worse. I'm not going to accept bad advertising just because "everybody does it". That's a crock! If Xerox puts out a bad ad, let them take the heat. Same for SUN. (Yes, and same for NBI!)