When advertising trumps technology

The link to the essays section has led to "coming soon" for far too long. On the one hand I'm tempted to skewer Microsoft in the first essay, but many others are already fighting that battle. I'm sure I will get to that soon, however. Instead I'll talk about advertising and technology.

Since the invention of the personal computer, and even before, there have unfortuantely been many instances where a slick advertising campaign has propelled an inferior technology to the critical mass needed to become the de facto standard and force everyone to use it.

In other cases, advertising has allowed some companies to be seen as the "name" brand, even though competing products may be just as good (perhaps better) and be less expensive.

Intel's Pentium commercials are a prime example. The commercials attempt to make novice computer users or first time computer buyers think that a good computer must have an "Intel Inside" sticker on it. In fact not only does Intel air its own advertisements, but it subsidizes the commercials of other companies like Gateway, Dell, and others if they include an Intel blurb in their commercials.

But the commercials don't include any facts, perhaps to avoid confusing the potential customer, perhaps because they don't have consistent, well-grounded facts to share.

Automobiles provide a good analogy. An automotive engineer can say fairly reliably that one car's engine may put out more horseposer, but it is hard for the engineer to say that one engine is all-around better than the other. It depends on so many factors, not just horsepower, but also gas mileage, how much maintenence is required, how easy it is to maintain, and surely other factors. Then on top of that, some engines are better for certain cars than others.

Judging computer processors is just as difficult a task. The main measurement used is the speed of the processor, in megahertz or gigahertz (one gigahertz = 1000 megahetz). As you might expect the higher the number, the faster the computer's processor can work and in general the quicker your computer should be.

But there are many other factors. There is the architecture of the processor to consider, which would be too difficult to describe in this document but in short more recently designed processors (such as the Intel Pentium 4) have "better" architectures than older processors (such as a Pentium 2).

Another, more quantifiable measurement is the cache size. Cache is a relatively small amount of memory that is faster for the processor to access than most of a computer's memory. Again, the larger the cache, the faster your computer should perform.

Although there are other factors to consider when looking at how your computer will perform, the last to be discussed here is system bus speed. System bus speed is how fast your computer's processor can access memory and other devices in the computer. A faster bus speed will imporve a computer's performance. In fact, a lower system bus speed may make a computer with a faster processor perform slower than a system with a faster system bus speed but not quite as fast a processor.

Just like there are some automotive engineers who can judge what engine may is best, there are some computer engineers who can determine what computer processor is best. Unfortunately, they don't always agree, further proving how difficult it is to definitively state one processor is better than the other.

Tying this thought back to Intel's advertising, they can't say that one processor is better than another with any grounding. They might be able to say it does a couple of specific things better, but they can't educate the consumer even as much as this article does in a commercial.

The point is that Intel's computer processors' aren't consistently better than their competitors. They leap frog eachother just like Ford, Chevy, Toyota and other car manufacturers do. If anything, most computer engineers who study the subject would say more often than not one of Intel's copetitors has a better processor chip than Intel at any given time.

So why does Intel advertise in such a way? It seems all they can hope for is to make novice computer users think they need Intel's chips and to build a brand along the way. Unfortunately for consumer's, Intel's processors are often quite a bit more expensive than their competitors' processors.

Here's the cycle: Intel funds advertising; advertisers make consumers think they need Intel processors; consumers buy overpriced computers with Intel processors more often; Intel earns extra money to cover advertising; repeat.

Who really makes out in this whole deal? Well, Intel maybe gets to be a little bit of a brand name. Maybe. Its unknown if the advertising deludes enough consumers to cover advertising costs. So the advertisers are the real winners. And we're stuck with commercials staring the Blue Man Group or guys in radiation suits.