> "An engineers actions are so far removed from revenue that they can't make a claim so directly"
This statement is simply not true in my experience as an engineer in the tech industry for over 15 years. Sell a bad product 'once', and the sales person 'ability' to sell it again will decrease. Sales people ultimately sell a project and its features, interpreted by engineers. You must incentivise an engineer to be creative, write better features and good code or you run the risk of having something that destroys a sales person reputation along with the companies revenue!
There are many, many ways to test! A control group, quasi-experiment evaluation etc. "Correlation does not imply causation". All she has is a hypothesis, a theory based on observational research, while this is ok, the article tries to pass this off as 'fact'.
I'm not staying I disagree with her 'hypothesis' but, people should require evidence before accepting it as fact. Maybe if she have quoted studies, instead she used well know experiments to justify the hypothesis. When the one experiments she did quote by Sergey Metalnikov even concludes...
"The difficulty for the investigator lies not so much in inducing such responses, but in employing the proper controls, both immunological and psychological, in order to demonstrate that these responses exist and to explore the underlying mechanisms." - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK3908/
I guess a book entitled "What I think" would not sell as well.
Quote: "By the end of the year, she had received just six doses of the drug instead of the usual twelve. Marette responded just as her doctors would have hoped from the full drug amount."
I'm sorry, at this point I stopped reading. The Doctors don't know how she would have responded to the full drug, because it didn't happen! The word 'hoped' is not testable! Where was the control (Quasi-experiment)? There is just not way to tell if she would have responded better, for all we know she was 50% better than she could have been if she'd taken the full 12 doses. Or maybe 6 doses was just the right amount for her.
I do believe that the brain is a powerful tool and have read research that shows we can change things like body heat, pain and more with mind, but this story did not have anything that evaluated the impact and cannot be used as evidence of such!
The second he made-up a statistic quote: 9 out of 10 computer problems are fixed by turning it off and on again (I love IT crowd), I stopped listening!
I'm more looking forward to seeing the Sony VR. It's rumoured to be around the $250-$350 price mark. Sony have a history of getting traction despite not having the best spec/product, for example, remember HD DVD vs Blu Ray?
This statement is simply not true in my experience as an engineer in the tech industry for over 15 years. Sell a bad product 'once', and the sales person 'ability' to sell it again will decrease. Sales people ultimately sell a project and its features, interpreted by engineers. You must incentivise an engineer to be creative, write better features and good code or you run the risk of having something that destroys a sales person reputation along with the companies revenue!