General Observation -Paucity of Reviews

[tklingman]

As someone evaluating whether to use Sugar CRM or any of the modules on the Experts Exchange, I"m really very surprised, relatively speaking, how few reviews there are in the Experts Exchange for each of the modules - even for products with many downloads. Of course there are a handful there with more attention, but overall, it's not well used. I'm really not sure what to make of this, but it generally makes me uneasy especially for those products with just one or two poor reviews.

[Angel]

I am not sure there is much to extrapolate from that to be honest.

This forum is a good example of a similar behavior. Take a look at the number of downloads for Sugar and compare it to the number of people that post on a regular basis. Those in the latter category number in the single digits.

Most people have other priorities, so it is understandable they wouldn't want to dedicate much time to participating here. I think a lot of the same is true for the reviews.

If you look at it from another angle, it is actually a good thing. It is a common held theory that when someone is dissatisfied with a company's product or service, that one will tell 7 - 10 other folks about their experience, but may only tell 1 other if the experience was positive.

Were we to take that at face value, we could argue that the number of reviews is about right and if the majority are positive, we could also argue that all the products are good, hence my point that whatever we could extrapolate could easily be manipulated.

[jnassi]

Additional to Angel's points, the best barometer of the quality of a SugarExchange listing/SugarForge project is to see what people are saying about it here in the main Forums. There's a LOT more discussion about the projects going on here than on the listing itself.