Back in July 1994, I was asked to write a piece for a magazine called Marketing Computers about this subject. By then I had spent more than eight years looking at computer products, mostly networking and communications hardware and software. I recently thought about this piece when I was conducting a review for Network World and had so many vendors refuse to participate. Here is the first of ten points that I made in the article:

Set up and manage a real program with budget, staff and collaterals for trade magazine reviews. Don’t try to compete with your actual customers for getting product to the reviewers: set aside a line-item in your marketing budget to purchase your own product for reviewers and maintain your own inventory.

You can read the remainder here on my site.

And this ancient column also served as the basis for a more modern talk that I gave at a 2014 Product Camp Unconference here.