MSI allegedly attempts to pay off a Youtuber not to post a negative review

[moproblems99]

gaming brand

Gaming brand = sucker.

Edit: In most cases.

 

[sneekypeet]

GELID founders are actually really nice guys. They'll send samples even if you trash the product, or won't publish a review at all . No blacklists and no discrimination. If anyone deserves a break it's them. If I remember correctly, the takeover was full of drama and insanity. Even the police was involved.

So because a company is full of nice guys, I'm supposed to not berate the product due to that? I do not see where leeway should be given to a review due to hardships or personalities.

 

[xtreemchaos]

i think msi had a compo to see who can make the worst lappy, i like MSI kit but ill be keeping my GP72MVR Leopard Pro a while longer its got better performance and its 2 n half years old. good to see that guy telling its going to stop some folks a lot of disspointment .

 

[moproblems99]

I don't believe a genuine MSI official offered anyone a bribe. "IF" it happened at all, it more likely was some low-level marketing/PR weenie working on his or her own behalf, or maybe even a sales rep who works on commission.

This reminds me of a news article some time back that many prominent members swore that anyone that worked at MSI could speak for the company in an official manner....(no accusations here).


Edit: here we go. Not a bad example: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/...n-300-series-motherboards.254669/post-4031773

 

[Fouquin]

That sounds so unlikely as to seem absurd(not you personally, just the notion of those events actually taking place). What I think is far more likely is that the Youtuber in question is over-exaggerating to stir the pot, making something out of nothing to get views and channel exposure.

I've collaborated with Andrew on reviews in the past. He's not one that strikes me as being out to get quick views and exposure by any means possible. During the Ryzen launch we noticed OC numbers weren't matching and reran a bunch of tests, even getting Wendell from L1T involved to corroborate. Andrew was very keen on making sure variables were retested for accuracy before posting anything.

My judgement of his character could be wrong, but we need more information to draw any conclusions at this point.

 

[neatfeatguy]

Social Media - where the accused is judged as guilty by people before any kind of facts are provided to prove if the accused is guilty or not.

We are no longer the land of "Innocent until proven guilty." We let stupidity and social media ruin the lives of people and companies before any facts are provided or even before any intelligent thoughts are shared.

 

[milewski1015]

Social Media - where the accused is judged as guilty by people before any kind of facts are provided to prove if the accused is guilty or not.

We are no longer the land of "Innocent until proven guilty." We let stupidity and social media ruin the lives of people and companies before any facts are provided or even before any intelligent thoughts are shared.

Stupidity and social media will take you quite far these days apparently

Wouldn't call myself a literature buff by any means, but I feel like as time goes on, Bukowski's "Dinoasuria, We" becomes more and more probable.

Literary Analysis of "Dinosauria, We"

Dinosauria, We Born like this Into this As the chalk faces smile As Mrs. Death laughs As the elev...

psuedobukowski.blogspot.com

 

[kiriakost]

Asus, in my experience is by far the steadiest and also oldest of the manufacturers. Of course they are not perfect. But I had many Asus boards now and they were all great so far. I also had MSI and Gigabyte. All good. But I won't support a brand, which is in shady businesses. As simple as that.

I have identical experiences , ASUS seems having also the steadiest CEO president among with chairman's team, this translates to mature decisions making.
MSI replaced the CEO few months ago, the new CEO he had a strange accident and he is now dead.
What the people are unable to see this is the ethical quality of the people (management) which making money from the MSI logo.

From personal experiences I will say that when the management this is Made in Taiwan (born in Taiwan) , then there is much more honesty within it.

 

[lexluthermiester]

I've collaborated with Andrew on reviews in the past. He's not one that strikes me as being out to get quick views and exposure by any means possible. During the Ryzen launch we noticed OC numbers weren't matching and reran a bunch of tests, even getting Wendell from L1T involved to corroborate. Andrew was very keen on making sure variables were retested for accuracy before posting anything.

My judgement of his character could be wrong, but we need more information to draw any conclusions at this point.

Ok, let's presume that you're right. The next question we need to ask is could this a be a culture/language barrier thing and a wild misunderstanding?

 

[Regeneration]

So because a company is full of nice guys, I'm supposed to not berate the product due to that? I do not see where leeway should be given to a review due to hardships or personalities.

That, the extreme difficulty designing a universal VGA cooler, and the GELID-Arctic soap opera. I remember reading that some people were banned from the workplace. One guy brought his mother to work. Really crazy stuff... things you don't see often in the industry.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Heres a 3rd party perspective from someone who reached out to the youtuber. This guy forwarded him messages & whatever screenshots of the interactions to hardware unboxed so its pretty safe to say it happened.

I guess MSI and AMD held back from commenting or responding to the accusations because MSI didnt know if he would be brave enough to speak out about it and for AMD - Its not their problem. it wasnt their fight to begin with.

Now the news is out there and its been confirmed. MSI are going to have to issue a response and yeah they are probably gonna blame it on some PR guy or PR agency they hired to do their promotions etc etc so therefore its not actually them that did the dirty business. Either way not a very good look for MSI

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
If it gets too sticky msi might just charge people for using msi afterburner

 

[Bill_Bright]

This reminds me of a news article some time back that many prominent members swore that anyone that worked at MSI could speak for the company in an official manner....(no accusations here).

Show us an official MSI statement posted on MSI's website, then I'll believe it. For now, NO WAY do I believe any and every MSI employee can "speak for the company" in any manner, official or unofficial. Period.

There is a HUGE difference between "representing" a company and being a company "spokesperson". If you are their PR person, or one of their executives, then you can speak for the company.

But if you simply wear a badge or uniform, then you may "represent" the company but you don't "speak" for them - other than what the company tells you you allowed to say.

For example, when I was in the Air Force, if I stopped off at the grocery store when I got off-duty, I was "representing" the Air Force. And if my uniform was a wrinkled, dirty mess, that would reflect poor on the Air Force (and I could actually have gotten in trouble if reported). But if my uniform looked "sharp", pressed, clean, and my "gig line" was straight, I was making a good impression and representing the Air Force in a good manner. But I still could not "speak" for it.

 

[Bones]

Show us an official MSI statement posted on MSI's website, then I'll believe it. For now, NO WAY do I believe any and every MSI employee can "speak for the company" in any manner, official or unofficial. Period.

There is a HUGE difference between "representing" a company and being a company "spokesperson". If you are their PR person, or one of their executives, then you can speak for the company.

But if you simply wear a badge or uniform, then you may "represent" the company but you don't "speak" for them - other than what the company tells you you allowed to say.

For example, when I was in the Air Force, if I stopped off at the grocery store when I got off-duty, I was "representing" the Air Force. And if my uniform was a wrinkled, dirty mess, that would reflect poor on the Air Force (and I could actually have gotten in trouble if reported). But if my uniform looked "sharp", pressed, clean, and my "gig line" was straight, I was making a good impression and representing the Air Force in a good manner. But I still could not "speak" for it.

This.

If you have the authority to speak for them that's one thing, if not it's another but in either case the fact if you are associated with them, you do represent them and that does carry a measure of responsibility.
That responsibility in itself does carry consequense and if it's true in this case I'd have to imagine someone's backside is gonna burn over it whether they have actual authority to speak on their behalf or not. Only thing I can say as an absolute truth about it is it wasn't me.

 

[lexluthermiester]

I like what Jay has to say on the subject;

 

[Chrispy_]

The only MSI laptops I have encountered have been awful. Cheap, nasty plastics that cracked - not from impact, but fatigue cracks in the garbage-tier plastics that slowly grew over the course of a few months of opening and closing the screen. Nasty materials and stiff, low-quality hinges sealed the deal there. My lesson? MSI's plastics are too cheap.

The next one was plagued by faulty drivers. Removing all of the MSI software stack and replacing with generic drivers solved the issue. This time, the lesson was that MSI can't do software. I have a low opinion of the Killer NIC software stack, and that was one of the culprits, but can't excuse MSI because the killer NIC was only one of three misbehaving drivers.

Finally, my most recent MSI laptop experiece was one of overheating. Too much TDP and not enough cooling. Throttled when new, throttled worse as the dust built up, eventually died to heat-stress cycles as it yo-yo'd between 40C and 100C every time windows did something in the background. My lesson that time was that MSI laptops run too hot.

I only bought the first one with my own money and the second and third failures just cemented my opinion on MSI laptops; All about the looks but not really designed to live with, or to last.

 

[Fouquin]

Steve throwing in his own experiences with MSI to add to Andrew's recent experience. Includes conversations with MSI from both parties.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

No more MSI parts for me then it seems

 

[TheLostSwede]

Well, a local Gigabyte rep tried to bribe me many many moons ago, to make sure Gigabyte won a motherboard group test (when they were still a thing) in the magazine I worked for at the time. I simply went and told my editor, as if you're going to work as a "journalist" you need to have some kind of morals or you might as well just do paid for reviews in the first place.

I mean, a lot of companies does just this, especially in SE Asia and India, but the paid for content is being disguised as reviews, since nowhere does it say that it's paid for content.

Having started out at a magazine back in what could only be called as the good old days when it comes to reviewers and writers getting paid at least half decent money for the content they produced, but today it's not the case. People are happy to earn $10 for a news post or $100 for a review. That's simply not something you can live on, so I'm also not surprised that many people accept some extra money for skewing a review in favour of the company.

Then again, the industry as a whole shot itself in the foot when online advertising took off, it was a race to the bottom. Magazines used to charge $20-30k for a full page ad. Suddenly all these new tech websites appear and they charge $500 a month for a banner ad. Where do you think the companies put heir ad money? Sadly it's hard to go up from there...

 

[robot zombie]

It's funny... and I can't place it, but for me MSI has always been that often makes decent to very good products, usually a slightly better value... and yet whenever I've been working up a build or looking at upgrades, for myself or anyone else, they've never been on my radar. I've never really known why. Just is.

If this is really all true (and it honestly never sounded that out there to me, regardless,) then they were already hurting themselves anyway. We can talk good optics/bad optics all day. But those are general impressions, which of course influences purchases. But ultimately good customers don't come back when they have bad experiences. So you can play the image game all day, but if the product/service is leading people to have bad experiences, you will have to work harder to keep what you gain over what you lose. It's damaging to your business. Doesn't matter if people know about it. They'll know when they buy, and then never come back. And you'll know when the margins aren't where they should be... and then you'll scramble to boost your image in order to draw in more new customers who won't come back.

It's a vicious cycle. Spending money to look better may work initially and seem much cheaper, but spending money to be better is an investment. But that's a dirty word these days. This idea of investing in a future of any sort. It's always now or never. I think it's foolish, but then maybe that's why I don't own a business.

 

[hat]

As far as I know, I've only ever had one MSI product: my old H67 motherboard. It was fine, but it was also a no-frills H67 board. I've overclocked on ASUS, Gigabyte, Biostar, and even DFI motherboards. To me, the end result was always similar... except the Biostar board I blew up, but that was my own fault for trying to overclock a then power hungry quad core on a cheap budget board with crappy power circuitry.

Nobody is in this business, or any business, to play nice. If you look, I'm sure you'll find that they all did something shitty at some point. If you want computer parts that come from a good, clean place... you'll probably have to start by mining raw materials yourself.

 

[TheLostSwede]

I should mention that I have also worked for MSI in the past, albeit at one of their "foreign" offices. The company culture is shite. One of the big bosses came over from Taiwan to have one on ones with everyone in the office. My colleague comes out bawling her eyes out. Turns out he ripper her a new one for no apparent reason and told her that she was shit at her job. That's not really how you treat your staff, regardless of how good or poorly they do their job. I mean, she was pretty clueless about tech, but didn't do a bad job otherwise. Besides, they hired me to do the tech part, so not sure what the problem was...

They were and maybe still are crap at maths. This was around the time when AMD launched the Opteron. Lady from HQ comes over to go visit potential customers for their new dual socket Opteron board, quite an expensive product for what it was. We visit a few places and finally end up at a company where I know the owner quite well for having reviewed their systems in the past. He says he's not too keen on MSI due to poor experiences in the past, but because it's me, they want to buy a sample order of five boards and if they're good, they'll buy 10 or so boards a month. Get back to the office and I get told that the quantity sin't high enough...
The funny thing here, they were selling a bottom tier board to a different customer at lots of 100 boards a month, that made them exactly the same amount of money as selling 10 of the Opteron boards a month would've made them... c'est la vie...

I guess it's a good thing I didn't work there for too long. It's funny, this seems to be a reoccurring theme for me when it comes to working for Taiwanese companies, it never seems to last longer than about six months and I don't think it's me...

The sad thing is that there's a lot of really good people in the industry in Taiwan, but most of them are underappreciated and overworked. They're also rarely listened to and they tend to be bypassed when its time for a promotion, so in the end they leave and go and do something entirely different. The tech industry is far worse off because of it.

 

[Chrispy_]

The sad thing is that there's a lot of really good people in the industry in Taiwan, but most of them are underappreciated and overworked. They're also rarely listened to and they tend to be bypassed when its time for a promotion, so in the end they leave and go and do something entirely different. The tech industry is far worse off because of it.

That attitude is why I have no problem watching Intel self-destruct, and do not care for other "too big to fail" market leaders much either. Once a company reaches a certain size it usually loses the "let's make cool things that people will want" ethos and turns into "how can we maximise our share value" business that does questionable things to hurt the industry as a whole.

 

[Keullo-e]

Gaming brand = sucker.

Edit: In most cases.

These days it's pretty hard to get high end hardware without any stupid gaming branding.

 

[Valantar]

Fascinating how all the "where is the evidence, all we have seen is a few claims with no backing" people seemed to disappear once this was corroborated by other (highly trustworthy) sources.

I've never bought an MSI product (they just never seem to fit my wants, always seem to be either too much or too little of something), and this definitely isn't making that any more likely in the future. Sounds like the company culture needs a scrubbing. Preferably with the kind of detergent that's effective at removing bad managers and executives.