Remember Mike Bayard and his “I love Belkin” reviews on Amazon, despite working for them? Well, Carbonite has been doing the same.
In addition to being the stuff that Han Solo was frozen in, Carbonite is an online backup service supplier. Unsatisfied customer Bruce Goldsteinberg, chose not to pay the premium rate of $20. After several days work (which he had to go unpaid for) and a number of lost files, he canceled his subscription to the service.
Nipping onto Amazon, he started looking for reviews of Carbonite, and stumbled onto this interesting post stating that a lot of Carbonite’s gushing reviews came directly from the company.
The review is strangely missing now, but Google archives works just fine. Now, isn’t that the same Swami Kumaresan who is VP of marketing in Carbonite? Jonathan Freidin, a senior software engineer, also wrote an ecstatic review. Interesting, no?
New York Times blogger David Pogue got in touch with Carbonite and received an email from its CEO, David Friend. “These ‘reviews’ on Amazon from 2006 should have sourced the authors as Carbonite employees,” it said. “I will personally see that the reviews are updated to disclose their employment affiliation. Had they been brought to my attention, they would have been removed long ago. We do have a policy about such things. I apologize to anyone who was mislead by these postings.”
So, had they been brought to your attention, you would have removed them, but since they were, they’ll just be marked? Well, that’s OK then. One more company to mark off the “trustworthy” list.
Source: The Register
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