So I was at an electronics store shopping for a HD enclosure (thanks to those who suggested it in a previous IMHO thread). I looked at some brand whose name I’ve forgotten, because they’re cheap, and I was given the opinion that brand didn’t really matter a lot in this case.
Then I looked at the back, and saw that this drive came with a “MANULA.” I immediately noticed just how cheapo the box and print seemed. At any rate, despite the earlier mentioned opinion, I put the box down and immediately discounted all offerings of that brand. Even though none of the other products seemed to have that particular typo, it was immediately made a LOT lower in my eyes.
I suppose at a certain point, it doesn’t become cost-feasible to hire a copyeditor to look over your box copy, but really.
Seagate, a massive multi-billion dollar manufacturer of hard drives, launched a world-wide advertising campaign with the tagline “Your on”. I like to hope that they’re better at hard drive manufacture than copyproofing.
At a rural Asian store several years ago, a shop offered two versions of the same simple appliance. Packaging was almost identical (I don’t remember if there were spelling errors). The main difference was the National package had a nice picture, while the InterNational package had a similar picture but with severe moire effect. There was no particular attempt to deceive: the “International” package being touted as a cheap knock-off.
Rural Asia is advancing. Fifteen years ago, when buying an automatic pump, several people advised me to buy Lucky Star which was significantly cheaper than Mitsubishi. When the pump needed to be replaced after not-too-many years, and I thought to buy Lucky Star (as the piping structure would otherwise need change) the stores snickered at me: “We don’t carry that brand – no one buys it anymore.”
Back in the Eighties, I opened a service manual for some Yamaha motorcycle or another and was impressed to find out that the bike had a “shit lever” for moving between gears.
Ever since they bought Maxtor, I’d have to say they aren’t.
I guess it depends on the products whether typos matter. The advanced features of my ASUS BIOS are pretty much guaranteed to contain wackiness, and the (truly awesome) report engine we use at work comes from Russia with slightly fractured documentation. (This I enjoy reading aloud while pretending that I have Russian hacker advisink me :D)