It's funny to me how often engineers lament how little marketing folks understand about tech but fail to see that it goes the other way too. Good marketing is just as difficult to do as good engineering. You need the people, the resources, the time and a product that warrants the investment.
Many engineers have a hard time communicating a good idea to a human standing in front of them, communicating to the entire world is an art and when it's done well it looks effortless, just like good engineering. I've spent some time in the the world of marketing and it taught me a lot about the challenges of cutting through the noise and the constraints that a corporation will put on you.
Come on. W2AEW works for them and could churn out a dozen short videos on the features in a few days. Tek must know this, yet he clearly wasn't tasked to do so.
Coming from a corporate POV I understand Brian's and ruairi's points. I don't know the size of Tek's technical marketing team, but as a person working on a technical role for a large manufacturer which also does product release and promotion on the sidelines, I can tell that it is no easy feat to churn out
polished short videos while juggling between the roles of customer support, testing/evaluation of new products, technical content creation and maintenance for each new released product. Tek is a large company, but I am pretty sure there is a lot of compartmentalization with limited resources that imposes prioritization of tasks when a product is released. As you said before, such class of equipment would have never attracted this much attention, thus indicating they did something right.
And anyone who wants to claim that Tek doesn't have anyone else who can do it, that BS. They got Gary Waldo to do a "5 minute overview" promo videos and he did a respectable job of that and it was fairly professionally shot. Whilst it showed some cool stuff, it was as advertised, a short overview.
In my opinion that is fine: give a short intro or overview and then feed the product to the sharks for a proper evaluation, given that any corporate review would be seen as heavily biased, incomplete or would be criticized in a way or another.
Tek clearly didn't understand that their target market want to see technical videos with detail.
I like videos as well, but honestly the target market for this oscilloscope is either getting loaners to play around or receiving a visit from Tek's representative to their own site.
They failed, and it wasn't because of a lack of resources, it was a lack of vision and execution, and a lack of understanding of what people want on launch day.
In my opinion: damned if you do, damned if you don't. Larger crowds find short videos more appealing, which would attract criticism as being superficial, incomplete or too focused on the features that overshadow the competition. Longer reviews tend to fall into nctnico's point: just give me a decent manual or, as I said before, just come to my company and let me play with a few of them.