snake oil from agnitum

how do i put this succinctly without seeming overly personal? folks, stop and think about how you're using the P word... which word is that? well, take a look at this agnitum blog post and see if you can figure it out:

First of all, why did we decide to add total malware protection to our core firewall product?

hmmmm, was it product? no it was protection, specifically total malware protection... i've said it before - the unqualified use of the word 'protection' is bad enough but to qualify it with a word like 'total' implies something about a product that just is not (and cannot be) true...

don't get me wrong, i know what the intended meaning of total malware protection is (it's supposed to mean that it offers a degree of protection from all types of malware, not all instances of it) but anyone who sits down and thinks about how the average person (with no knowledge of the malware field) will interpret that phrase should realize that average people will not understand or even conceive of that intended meaning... you know what they might understand though? that it's comprehensive, that it has full/total/complete coverage, or simply that it handles all types of malware... if you're going to write marketing material make sure you thoroughly consider how the average person thinks...

now at this point you might be thinking there goes kurt picking on the smallest little slip-up again, but there's more... snake oil isn't just about making outrageous claims, another hallmark of snake oil is the unthinking use of jargon... consider the following:

Using award-winning VB100 technology licensed from a leading malware expert

now i ask you, what is VB100 technology and what awards has it really won? actually knowing what you're talking about is a good first step towards not sounding like a snake oil peddler and that means knowing that VB100 isn't the technology but rather the award... maybe it's a grammatical slip-up by someone for whom english isn't their native tongue, but if so it stands in stark contrast with what is otherwise excellent english prose...

and yet there's still more... i understand they're licensing anti-malware technology from a vendor whose won the VB100 award but who is the vendor? wouldn't that be a good thing to tell people? wouldn't it be nice to be able to verify that that vendor actually won the VB100 award rather than taking agnitum's word for it? wouldn't it be nice to be able to look at the VB100 history to see how often the vendor won the award (since that is where the real significance of the VB100 award lies)? i mean really, if the vendor's engine is so great then the name should engender consumer trust, so why be obscure by basically referring to it as an unnamed award winning technology? what is there to hide?

you know what's really sad though? from the description it actually sounds like it's a pretty good engine (detection of all malware types integrated into a single light-weight client process) that really deserves a higher standard of promotion...