Update…
Cnet Reporter Stephen Shankland Contacted PPS (as well as left a comment) in regards to the poll. He says the the poll is absolutely not gamed, and that Apple in no way dictates his reporting.“the poll is not faked or some church-and-state-violating, undisclosed advertising scheme that Apple or CNET cooked up. Also, I’d note that online polls shouldn’t be trusted to be a statistically valid representation of “approval rating” or some other form of market or public preference. Finally, our software blocks multiple votes from the same IP address”
Stephen feel that the poll probably just got voted on a lot by Apple fans, and naturally once Apple linked to it the apple fans would be all over it. I can say that I myself get a lot of info from Cnet, and have never felt their reporters have a lack of journalistic integrity. It’s good to see their proactive about responding to this rumor.As to which one is actually better. I’ll leave that up to you!
Theres been quite a bit of attention given to a poll over on Cnet that claims Apertures approval rating is around 65% while Lightroom only has about 36% Apple was so happy about this that they were actually bragging about the poll results on their site.
Now we think Cnet is usually pretty good about these things, but it really looks like this poll may be at least woefully wrong.
We’re not here to put down a poll simply because Aperture is winning. The poll percentages however don’t change more than a tiny fraction over time, even though the number of votes does. Mainly however we know there are FAR more LR users than Aperture users and these poll results make no sense with what we see in the industry. Apple is bragging about these results likes it’s a victory, but what we see in the poll just doesn’t jive with what we see in the real world. You can also see this LR news article for more info.
Something defiantly seems bogus here. We’ll keep our eye on this and see where it goes. Could Apple be so desperate that their getting Cnet to skew polls just to get noticed? Is there an error? Or is this actually be accurate? We’ve added our own Lightroom vs Aperture poll below. We’ll see what comes of it.
In response to the “phony poll” Talkback posting in the commentary section below the poll itself, to which you referred above, I offered the following response yesterday:
http://www.news.com/5208-13580_3-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=35432&messageID=381872
In short, the poll isn’t an Apple ad, and we don’t claim that the poll is a statistically valid representation of the true views of the overall market. I’d have thought most folks who saw an online poll open to all comers guessed by now that it’s not something on which anyone should base their product decisions, marketing plans, or self-esteem.
I think it’s highly likely that Apple fans simply voted a lot. Apple, on its own initiative, posted links to the poll to http://www.apple.com/startpage/ and to http://www.apple.com/hotnews/
I encourage people to contact me directly when they have questions about this sort of thing. My e-mail address, stephen.shankland@cnet.com, is in the “About Underexposed” biography section on the right side of the page.
For some reason I can’t vote in Mozilla…
The in post polls seems to behaving some trouble. Have you tried the poll on the left.
Gav
for some reason, i can’t vote for Aperture…. now, i think this poll is fixed.
one up for Aperture
No it’s not fixed Jeff. We are having some problems with the in post poll however but it’s for LR as well as Aperture. If the poll does not work in post, you can still vote on the same poll in the left panel, or in the polls archive… Gav