Our first constituancy is you, the readers. If we trumpet a product that has serious flaws, we waste your time and money. Worse, we lose your trust. Our second constituancy is the industry we report on. If we overlook a product, or overlook any of its virtues, we can cost a vendor sales. Worse, we damage an industry we deeply love.

If we can't do a job right, we're better off not doing it at all. We defer to the likes of PC Magazine, with their much greater resources, for thorough analyses of hardware and software. We hope that the magazines closer to our size and constituancy do not themselves get overly ambitious.

What we print instead of product reviews are user reports. These are more anecdotal descriptions by people who use products to get useful work done. Like the rest of our authors, they share many of the needs and views as you, the readers. Our hope is that this commonality of goals offsets the fact that we can't unleash an entire testing laboratory.

We recently killed a user report just before it went into print. Seems we allowed it to include a head-to-head comparison of two major products, complete with benchmarks. One of the affected vendors raised a number of legitimate objections to the test criteria. (We try not to surprise people — prepublication review is common here.) Rather than publish a mismash of claims, rebuttals, and counter claims, we dropped the story.

I don't tell you all this just to sound virtuous. We need lots more people who are willing to share their experiences. There are lots of fine products out there that your fellow readers should know about. We are averse to letting vendors trumpet their own products — you have to do it for them. Or you have to say why the trumpets should be muted for a given offering.

We'd like to increase the number of user reports we print. I'll only do that if we can keep the quality high. You can help by sharing your experience more freely. If you have an idea for a user report, please let us know about it.

P.J. Plauger
pjp@plauger.com