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Surveys, Polls, Voting, and why they usually stink
I’ve never been a big fan of surveys or polls. Not because I don’t like them, but because I always disagree with their validity and the conclusions that are drawn from the results. Lets take a look at a couple of examples. Readers Choice awards were recently handed out. I received an email from a customer who wanted to let me know that he was contacted by a component vendor to go out and vote for them, and he didn’t even own their product. To my surprise, he wanted to know where the Infragistics email was. My answer – we make a very conscious effort to limit the number of emails we send out to our customer base. At the end of the day, our decision to keep spam out of our customer’s inboxes also meant that we were at a disadvantage in the survey/poll/award. Does the poll actually show which product is the best? Or does it show who spent more time and energy on campaigning for votes?