>> branded computers are more reliable than beige boxes.
This is meaningless.
The real question is how those compare to beige box that uses a decent parts. But Microsoft definitely has interest in helping manufacturers of brand computers because piracy is more prevalent in beige boxes.
This paper was written by researchers in Microsoft Research, and accepted in an academic conference. It is not marketing. To be clear, you are suggesting that the researchers were dishonest in order to help their company. I find this unlikely.
Their conclusions on "white boxes" are based on relatively straightforward statistical analysis of their data. In order for there to be bias against white boxes, one of the following has to be true:
1. Their data collection methods are biased against white boxes. Given the large sample size and the method of retrieving samples - automatically generated crash reports from users - I find this unlikely. They cover this point in section 3.2.1.
2. Their statistical analysis is flawed. I see no issues with it, nor did the reviewers. (Otherwise it wouldn't have been accepted.)
3. They lied. I am most skeptical on this one.
It's disingenuous to gesture at researchers and allege bias based on their employer without actually saying how they are biased. Doing so is not valid skepticism, but prejudice.
My suspicion is that branded hardware manufacturers are uniformly reasonably good in quality. White box vendors may vary widely: some are good, but some (many? few?) are really, really bad. This can skew data.
It's also possible that it's getting more difficult to accurately spec systems, to enforce vendor quality (Dell gets a bad batch of drives, they can 1) detect it and 2) tell the vendor to stuff it, Ahmed's Boxez'R'Us may not have that leverage or depth of experience), and to do burn-in testing of their own systems.
That said, I've had good and bad experiences with big-name and white box vendors alike.
One question is what happens to a component that fails a major OEM's QC standards, where does it go? In to the garbage? Or into the whitebox channel?
For example, some have speculated that "Gamer RAM" with mean looking heatsinks is actually poorer quality stuff that requires additional cooling to work correctly.
The problem is that they didn't wrote in their paper :"white boxes are known to have large variability in their level of reliability. We leave it to further study to compare the reliability of white boxes built with quality components to brand boxes".
Do you think they haven't known that ?
This kind of remarks of the incompleteness of research done is common in many research papers. And they definitely contribute to readers not getting the wrong impression.
The problem with your statement is that it's based on anecdote. From their related work section: "The effect on failure rates of overclocking and underclocking, brand name vs. white box, and memory size have not been previously studied." You assume that white boxes have a large variability in reliability based on your personal experience and anecdote. But, according to the authors, there is no systematic study backing that up. "Quality components" is similarly difficult to pin down.
The authors stated a conclusion, but did not speculate on the cause behind the conclusion. I see no bias in them not calling attention to the fact that they have not studied the cause - that is self-evident.
A large mfg, I would imagine, would test a configuration repeatedly before making it available, and then, once approved, the individual systems would go through burn-in, probably with more rigor than beige boxes. So even beige boxes with pricier (but unproven configurations) might suffer from grater failure rates. In addition, large mfgs might be able to demand better "lots" from their parts mfgs/oems.
I was wrong! A former Dell employee tells of touring a plant and seeing the test station - hydra-like cables dangling from the ceiling with 1 plug for every hole in the computer. It would get plugged in, network-boot diagnostics and run for some time before being passed. But this was 12 years ago...
Would you be happier with it if it said "a randomly-chosen branded computer is, on average, likely to be more reliable than a randomly-chosen beige box"?
Taking a stab in the dark here but I am wondering how important users messing with their boxes are there.
I assume more "beige boxes" are either bought together from cheap components and been assembled by the users themselves or are generally cheap noname buys assembled by who-knows in the shop or maybe they have been modified and/or over-clocked by enthusiasts thus making it more likely to fail - whereas the typical users who buy "brand name" PCs or laptops are not going to mess with them and they can rely on at least SOME standardized quality assurance and control.
I agree with you that many factors need to be considered here that isn't mentioned in the paper. But they mention in section 5.3, "Brand name vs. white box", that "to avoid conflation with other factors, we remove overclocked machines and laptops from our analysis."
This is meaningless.
The real question is how those compare to beige box that uses a decent parts. But Microsoft definitely has interest in helping manufacturers of brand computers because piracy is more prevalent in beige boxes.