Laporte’s Objectivity Questionable
I like Leo Laporte but I’ve been thinking lately that he is no longer objective. He’s always been a bit of a showman (and that’s what draws people to listen and watch him. But I was just listening to the latest installment of This Week in Tech and I’m not happy with some of the things he said.
Early on in the podcast Laporte said that he’s happy that the iPhone has been unlocked. That’s a fair comment but he went on to say Apple “forced us to go to AT&T”. This is where I take exception. Apple didn’t force anyone to do anything. Did Apple put a gun to Leo’s head and say “buy this phone or we’ll shoot!”? No. He wanted to get the phone despite it’s known limitations. I can understand his critiques of the phone and if he’s positive in talking about the unblocking since this is a major technical achievement (people have been working on this all summer) but his rationale is severely skewed.
Next Laporte totally mis-reported Skype’s position on their recent outage. Laporte reported that Skype blamed a massive reboot due to patches that Microsoft released the second week of August. Though not entirely incorrect Laporte left out an important detail which I read in several places. Skype didn’t blame the outage directly on the reboots. What they said was that the reboots uncovered a bug in the login area of the latest version of their software. I agree with Laporte when he says the excuse is just a smokescreen. When you test your software you test for load at all points especially points of entry such as login screens so this kind of bug should have been revealed in simulations. So I’ll give Leo a bit of space on this one since he got the story from John C. Dvorak‘s Cranky Geeks. (Cranky Geeks is a great webcast but the panel, including Dvorak, very often starts to crank before Dvorak finishes reading the story they’re there to discuss.) But if you’re going to rank on something then be sure you rank on the right facts.
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