[Note: I'd answer the question "What's wrong with pundits?" but who has that kind of time?]
Responding to an article by David Borlind, the Macalope writes:
…but one of the biggest problems with the current state of punditry is to confuse what the public wants with what the pundit wants. The two are not necessarily the same.
What bothers me is that tech pundits all seem to be feature obsessed. I guess the progression is something like:
But they go farther than that, because this check-box obsession colors all of their perceptions, and you end up with market predictions based on feature lists. It’s all well and good to say, “I think you should buy Product A because it includes extra dongles,” or whatever, but when you say, “Nobody will buy Product B because it lacks extra dongles,” you’re treading on thin ice.
Especially when Product B is made by Apple.
Haven’t these people gotten the memo? Apple isn’t famous for all the features they add to computers, they’re famous for leaving things out. Sure, they were among the first manufacturers to ship all of their computers with USB ports, but everybody remembers the fact that they left floppy drives out of iMacs. Yes, they added video to iPods, but what’s more remarkable are the things they’ve never added: FM receivers, WMA support, subscription services, displays of meta-data, removable batteries, removable storage and plain old USB ports.
And they probably never will.
What these people are forgetting is that most consumers don’t shop with feature lists. Why do you think there are so many 480i TVs for sale? No sane person would buy one if they knew better, but that’s not how consumers shop. The justifications I hear for buying consumer electronics sound like:
Any pundit that doesn’t understand these things needs to be fired. Aren’t there minimum requirements for these jobs?