Vadim Motorine's Ideas Blog

Buying computer as gambling

When we buy a computer we virtually never can rely on the opinions of our friends, experts, magazine reviews, consumer societies and Internet portals and our own.

Why? Let us assume that we are trying to find an expert that can help us to buy a good and reliable computer. I doubt that they exist.

Indeed, to be the expert the person should have experience of the modern computers from several manufacturers. Moreover he/she should work sufficiently long with each of the computer to estimate the usability. To check the reliability the expert should test several computers from each manufacture and again sufficiently long. Do such people exist in nature? Well, probably, there are few in large companies whose job is to study the competitors but they are difficult (i.e. long) to find and they are probably not allowed to share their experience of the competitors.

So it seems that there are no experts in the computer buying except for the user opinion and we should search not for the experts in the computers but rather for the experts in studying the user opinion. In other words we need the results of the professionally performed poll. The poll should include the thousands of the participants, because to have reliable opinion about just one brand you should ask about one hundred people and better one thousand. More over the questions should be carefully worded to get the real opinion and avoid the response bias. It is clear that such a poll is very expensive. All the "polls" that I am able to find in the well known computer magazines and free Internet sources used opinion of few, often just one expert and I believe that such polls cannot give the reliable result.

How then to buy a good reliable computer without spending large money for the results of the poll? Well, I have an idea.

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