[johnkizer]

This article didn't read like character assassination to me, personally - most of the time spent on GRC/SpinRite (after the overall topic of disk recovery is introduced) seems to be either observations about Gibson's style with which I think many would agree - e.g.

"It doesn't help that Steve Gibson's writing is pervaded by a certain sort of... hucksterism. A sort of ceaseless self-promotion that internet users associate mostly with travel influencers selling courses about how to make money as a travel influencer."

Or substantive critical points about the software, e.g.:

"This gives the flavor of the central problem with SpinRite: it claims to perform sophisticated analysis at a very low level of the drive's operation, but it claims to do that with hard drives that intentionally abstract away all of their low level details."

And I think it's fair to ask someone who is selling a piece of software for $89 to provide some backing for their claims beyond ones that would only pertain to largely-obsolete hardware.

[at_a_remove]

I think you are dead on. I recall -- perhaps incorrectly -- that Gibson has been just silly amounts of incorrect on some things, but SpinRite itself, I've never heard anything but "... and then everything worked like a minor miracle." And you're correct, Gibson has a certain, uh, Wolfram-y habit of selling himself whenever possible, which doesn't help matters, but I hope people can manage to separate the personality from the product.

[Gormo]

> Wolfram-y

Wolfram has already gone from alpha all the way to upsilon?

[effie]

Observations of Gibson's style are all negative, except at the very end, praising the user interface. But that last element read more like a quick self-cleaning ritual for the author of the piece, rather than effort to provide a balanced description.

Gibson's style may very well be overly self-congratulary and deserving criticism, and many could agree on that. But this piece still reads like inordinate amount of effort just to show somebody and their work in negative light, without actually checking their product and evaluating it rationally and equitably. Even if there are bad things to say about Mr. Gibson's style or his software, the software may still be working and useful, and no attempt at serious evaluation was made.

> And I think it's fair to ask someone who is selling a piece of software for $89 to provide some backing for their claims beyond ones that would only pertain to largely-obsolete hardware.

I agree it is fair to ask, and Mr. Gibson seems like a reasonable ,easy to talk person. Did you try? He has a podcast, Twitter and a newsgroup discussion forum.