Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

I was reading some comments below an article on a well known IT portal:

http://www.chip.pl/news/sprzet/karty-graficzne/2010/06/geforce-gtx-460-czyli-najtansze-directx-11-od-nvidii

It’s in polish, so here goes the translation:

Czy te CUDA o których piszecie przyspażają Nvidi wiernych?

Does this CUDA you write about give Nvidia new worshippers?

And another one:

Ale porażka. Widać, że Nvidia sobie kompletnie nie radzi na rynku układów graficznych.

What a fail. It's clear that Nvidia completely fails on the GPU market.

I am using both NVidia and ATI cards, and frankly, I don’t understand where all this hatred, all this venom come from.

It is clear, that people have emotion and all various feelings that form up in human mind. This is normal and there is nothing wrong with that. Discussions are usually polite, because most of us have been brought up in such a way. Internet on the other hand allows great deal of privacy, so some people stop caring about being polite – why should I be polite if no one knows me? (besides site admin and ISP). So sometimes emotions take over, people don’t care and then the discussion becomes an argument. (read more)

“Being a hater is just waste of emotion.”

But there is no argument in the example I have posted above. These are just random comments under an internet publication. When I realized that, I began looking at it from a different perspective:

  • some products have more haters than others
  • these products are usually more expensive
  • people buying cheap consider themselves smart-ass
  • some people are parrots repeating other’s opinions
  • most haters will not try the hated product – prejudice

A conclusion forms up, that a statistic hater is a person who is either a scrooge or otherwise unable to afford the “hated” product, or just pretending to be a smart-ass: “why would I pay more for the same thing, if I can pay less for similar thing”. The truth is, depending on the target market (low end, mid-range, high end) there are  someNVidia cards, which are better and there are some ATI cards which are better. There is never much balance on the market, so there is no point in being a hater: you just buy the product which at the given time is better (or equal) performance-wise and cheaper then the other.

There is another well known brand that raises as much lave as it does hatred: Apple. In this case the main argument is that Apple computers are overpriced and offer worse hardware, but cost much more than PC. I do not own a Mac, but I have tried my friends MacBook Air and I liked it. I am also compelled to say OSX is very different from Windows (Linux is also different, by the way). In my opinion it is consumer right to decide if he wants Windows or Linux or OSX, and comparing the prices of those is in my opinion devoid of sense, because computer is not just hardware.

I guess that the best approach is to carefully weight all pros, cons and the price tag, and have an open mind to try other products (says a person who owns a Windows Mobile phone, Symbian phone and iOS phone, still missing the Android). Being a hater is just waste of emotion.

All brands belong to their respectful owners and have only been used as a base for comparison.