Two of anonymous Belkin employees have come back with replies to the statement released by Belkin's president Mark Reynoso about faked product reviews. Belkin has supposedly paid for positive reviews, gave products with custom firmware to reviewers in order to hide bugs, faked hardware certification logos, wrote poor reviews of competitor's products and backed out of CES for lack of funding as inferred from the employees post.An anonymous person claiming to be a former Belkin employee has commented in response to the statement released by Belkin's president Mark Reynoso about faked product reviews. Below is the published comment:
Having worked for Belkin for 10 years and this is only the tip of the ice berg, I used to do worse than this to gain market share and inside information on the competition. Belkin WAS the hands down leader in the market and was the greatest place to work. I can remember walking through CES, Comdex, MacWorld, or any retailers corporate office and watching my competition gasp in awe when Belkin was in the house. The day Chet brought back Mark Renoso was the second worst decision he has made (first was not manufacturing network cards when Linksys got out the the printer sharing business). Mark is the King of micro mangers and NOTHING at Belkin gets approved or done without his stamp of approval. I was once a person that did dirty deeds for Mark Renoso in the market place to gain share and information. I even kept hard copies of emails with such requests. The best thing Belkin can do to repair this major damage is to get rid of Mark Renoso. He is the only one pulling the puppet strings.
Jeff Mc
Jeff Mc
Gizmodo also recently published an email from an anonymous person claiming to work for Belkin currently which sheds light on Belkin's supposedly dirty practices
While never mentioned in an "official" policy, for years it has been pressed upon ALL Belkin employees to do whatever is needed to get good product reviews and good press. Everything from sending blog writers a device with custom firmware that hides known bugs yet claiming it to be official release firmware, faking hardware logo certifications (specifically Apple and MSFT), releasing blatantly inaccurate data from test results making our devices look superior to others, to placing "tailored" reviews of our products into places visible to consumers (as reported Amazon, etc), as well as writing poor reviews of competitors products. In the past there have even monthly awards given to Business Units who achieved the most positive reviews, regardless as to the products rate of customer returns. The concept being that even if a consumer has been mislead by a review or data on the box, the chance that they will return the product is very little. Infact, our products are such junk, when an internal survey was done, it was found that the majority of Belkin employees purchased competitors products for home use, even with ours being offered free, as they are of such poor quality.
We have paid magazines for positive reviews, made custom devices or fixtures for use at trade shows to ensure quality demos. One such example would be a fixture that runs hidden cable to a TV or audio receiver, yet claiming the broadcast is coming from a wireless transmitter, or through a USB hub.....
We have paid magazines for positive reviews, made custom devices or fixtures for use at trade shows to ensure quality demos. One such example would be a fixture that runs hidden cable to a TV or audio receiver, yet claiming the broadcast is coming from a wireless transmitter, or through a USB hub.....
We need someone to make something halfway decent. An Intel Atom powered router by chance?
What?
I changed a defective Belkin G router for that WRT54GL. Installed Tomato and that was it. I don't need to reboot the router almost every 3 or 4 days as i had with the Belkin.
That and the lack of firmware updates were my major complaints.
why you say what theres routers that are powered by Intel chips. Like mine is powered by Intel VIIV
We need someone to make something halfway decent. An Intel Atom powered router by chance?
I still run a WRT54GL v1.1 and WRT54G v8.0 here at work. They run quite well and are flashed with pre-released builds of DD-WRT v24 SP2 (different builds each). The one operates as a repeater and the other as a ethernet to wireless client bridge. The GL is the repeater and the G is the bridge which also has a compressed CFE to allow just a bit more into the firmware.
I have an ASUS WL500g Premium router at home that runs a slightly modified firmware that contains a crapload of stuff.
Absolutely!
You mean like make good products? Sounds like good policy to me! Shame it's not as good in practice.
Actually that's probably a bit harsh, I have only ever owned a Belkin Bluetooth dongle, and never had a problem with it!
Note: I did not get paid to write this, lol.
Belkin has been junk for quite a while. I can't make any comments on this anonymous former employee and what is stated though, as I cannot personally validate it for myself.
Last edited by virtorio on 26 Jan 2009 - 01:58
Controlling and disseminating propaganda is one thing, even unethical practices - but if your product(s) is/are successful, not only will no one really notice, no one will really care in the end, as notable success tends to dampen the impact of bad press.
On the flip side, I've got a Belkin Surge protector that's supposedly insured for up to £100,000 should anything on it go toast (Although based on this article, I wouldn't be so sure that they'd honour it) that's worked fine since the day I bought it and I also have a very nice Belkin Rucksack that's designed for carrying laptops, which also comes with a lifetime warranty (once again, I wouldn't bet on them honouring it, but it's definitely very well made) that I wouldn't trade for anything else.
Controlling and disseminating propaganda is one thing, even unethical practices - but if your product(s) is/are successful, not only will no one really notice, no one will really care in the end, as notable success tends to dampen the impact of bad press.
That's nearly perfect. The only flaw: replace the first "good" with "successful".
The perfect description of Apple. As I said numerous times, nowadays "Controlling and disseminating propaganda and even unethical practices" leads to success, not shameful fall.
Yes I have. That has no relevance to what I wrote though. The First Amendment does not require me to believe everything that is written by an anonymous source without verifying their claims.
Why dont you be specific in what you comment and explain your problem.
Only weak people say "with all due respect"
3Com and NetGear for SOHO, Juniper and Cisco for Enterprise. (And ProCurve for switches!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0486674/ratings
See that 10* rating line which sticks like Pinocchio nose?
Usually I've valued bad reviews more than good ones, because you know that they are not paid for.
It looks like you can't trust even bad review because someone will try to put price even on dogs s**t.
Last edited by EJocys on 26 Jan 2009 - 14:19
Which is way below the 37.5MB/s (300MB/s) theyre rated at .
Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!
Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.