David Pogue: Can Blogger-Bashers Predict the Success of a Product? Unlikely.

...every now and then, a couple of messages come in that really irk me. These messages tell me how wrong I am about something I reviewed, which is fine — but they come from people who have never even tried the product. It was that way with the iPhone, in the time after it was announced but before it was available. “This will be the biggest flop since the Cube,” went the critics. “No removable battery? Nobody will touch this thing.” Etc. The blogs were full of this stuff. As it turns out, they were massively, humiliatingly wrong. Four million iPhones were sold in the first 200 days. Its sales surpassed Treos, Windows Mobile phones — everybody but BlackBerry. So what’s the lesson here? Simple enough: those vocal pre-release blogger-bashers are terrible predictors of a product’s success or failure.

Pogue is one of my favourite tech guys. Intelligent, witty, knowledgeable and without pretension. If only all the others were like that.