Answer: an epiphytic marketing industry.

More specifically: a plethora of meaningless awards and certifications and the companies and organisations responsible for them.

Go to the wine section in your supermarket and you’ll see dozens of bottles with little silver, gold, or bronze “medals.” Read the labels and find out what awards they’ve won. Often it’ll be “best” of some ridiculous niche category like “best merolt-shiraz blend from the west side of Dead Man’s Hill.” Seriously, many of them are about that precise, covering all of 3 or 4 wines. That’s if they explain anything about the award at all, in other cases it may just have a year and the name of some unheard-of wine show, or grand-sounding “challenge.”

In my years of drinking wine I’ve come to the conclusion that there is very little relationship between awards and my enjoyment of the wine. However there is some relationship between the awards and the price of the wine. As far as I see it you’re better off going for cheaper wines with no awards. It’s hard to remember this sometimes, we grow up instilled with such a strong sense that everything must be ranked that this “medal” technique hammers right into our subconscious bypassing rational thought.

The technology sphere has a similar system, whereby a plethora of publications, organisations, and dodgy websites give out awards like they’re going out of fashion (I wish.) Many of the awards will have dozens of categories that really only contain 3 or 4 competing products. Sometimes even less since some of these schemes require you to pay up to be considered (and I expect many wine awards are the same.) These rankings are usually of little technical merit, even often judged by non-experts based on marketing material rather than any practical results. Techies may dismiss them yet, disturbingly, they can be an important part of selling a product. The inexpert are easily swayed by these seeming ticks-of-approval, as with wine it can be exactly this sort of meaningless ranking that gets you short-listed in the mind of your customers (most products are not sold to experts.)

Certifications are similar. Take IGT/DOC/DOCG in Italian wine for example, a set of rules that define how you must make your wine if you want to market it in certain ways. It seems as if you’re claiming some guarantee that your wine attains a minimum standard of quality. In reality the only real meaning is that the wine complies by a set of rules that grant it the acronym and, like the awards, enjoyability bears little relationship to the certification. The fact is that mere Vino Da Tavola wines (“table wine,” the term for uncertified wine) seem to be as good a bet if you just want to enjoy a glass. Further, most people don’t know what all the classifications mean anyway! Quality is rarely certified, typically the most you can read into it is location, grape blend, and process – in the hope that prescribed bounds increases the chances you’ll enjoy your wine.

In technology systems exist that are much the same. (Also for people, but that’s another issue.) Some are tick-box standards or rule systems, like the currently hyped SOx and PCI. The problem with these is that compliance really only means that you’ve “gone through the motions,” there’s no guarantee that you actually care or are pro-active about the problems the systems supposedly address. Another form of certification is “product X achieved Y with system Z” – any tech person I know looks at these things and shrugs, sometimes muttering an expletive. It’s a funny old situation where successful companies are created around products that give certifications that the entire base of technical experts in the relevant field dismiss as not being a whole lot of use! But the fact is that, while they’re rarely a useful assessment of the practical effectiveness of a product, they’re often an important cog in the marketing machine. People want benchmarks, people want ratings – how else can they judge the quality. The underlying problem is that there are few experts but many buyers.

Where the whole thing goes most horribly wrong, in the tech industry at least, is when this system starts feeding back into itself. Regulations are created that spawn whole technologies, such as SOx and PCI. We get technology specified by the regulations rather than focused on solving the problems the regulations were invented to address. Defacto-standard rankings are created that measure a quantity that isn’t actually a useful part of a technology’s function. We expend vast engineering effort tuning technologies to do well in the rankings rather than addressing real problems. Successful companies are born from the precise specification and measurement of the wrong things!

It is a little reassuring that no number of unreliable or misleading guarantees makes a crap product a good one and that’ll be the stumbling block for many solutions riding a wave of medals. Alas, it is much harder for the inexpert to know the technology they’ve bought is crap than it is for the inexpert to know the wine they’re drinking tastes like copper coins. (This doesn’t matter so much for wine, there are many buyers and you can get by just fine if you never sell a second bottle to the same person. You typically have much more restricted markets with technology and rely on people coming back for more.)

I started typing this up with the intention of jotting down just a couple of paragraphs comparing wine medals to technology awards. Now it’s >1000 words later and I’ve left many loose ends flapping around in my mind. Someone who knew enough about the industry, marketing, and human psychology could probably write a decent paper (or book) on this. “Technology Defined by Marketing” or, more scathingly, “Selling Widgets to Idiots.” I expect it’d probably be boring and wouldn’t change anything anyway.