They're both ridiculous, and no-one should be willing to hand out PR points for one being less inane than the other.
We categorize crimes and a lot of other things in this world via varying degrees of intensity. Why should this be an exception?
Because the whole thread will become a 'who's the most deceitful international megacorporation' bitch-fest. They're all misleading to promote their products. The fact one may appear fairer is just a fluke - there's no intention to be honest. Maybe some people want to distinguish someone embezzling bank funds for 10 million and leaving thousands of people bankrupt as better than someone embezzling bank funds for 12 million and leaving thousands of people bankrupt, but it's all the same really.
The Sony sheet is representing chalk and cheese by carefully selected similarities alone. "Our product (chalk) is whiter than their product (cheese) as this scientifically accurate measure shows." I mean, come on! "Buttons - yes, yes, no". the whole point to Kinect is it hasn't got buttons. Turning that feature into a checkbox that remains empty on MS's listing is utterly misleading. You cannot understand these products through a checklist. Checklists have only been employed to deliberately mislead readers into making unfair, meaningless comparisons.
How do you know this to be true? Traditionally, the more you are bound by facts the closer you stay to it. Maybe some people don't want to distinguish someone embezzling bank funds for 10 million and leaving thousands of people bankrupt as better than someone embezzling bank for for 120 million and leaving TENS of thousands of people bankrupt and killing some of them, but it's not all the same.
Do you honestly and truly believe there's a PR department at Sony or MS that wants to be accurate and honest even if means painting themselves in a less glowing light?
The difference here isn't that large. Both Sony and MS have taken blows at each other in the information wars. That one may have landed a bigger hit doesn't bestow on them any virtue.
This isn't really about fairness and justice, but PR spin. Do you not remember the pages of bickering over Sony's E3'05 show? It's quite possible to take these PR blurbs and write pages and pages of valid arguments to back them up, resorting to all sorts of subjective considerations to determine which is the more honest company. Yet at the end of the day not one of them has created these comparisons with an intention of being an honest source of information. Putting it another way: Two conmen, Mr. Blogs and Mr. Smith visit you one day, both trying to con you out of $1000. Mr. Blogs' lies convince you and you lose $1000. Mr. Smith's lies aren't as convincing and you turn him away. Are you now going to say Mr. Smith is a better person than Mr. Blogs because, despite having the same intentions, he was inept?
Yes. On the Sony list that's a tick for them. MS could have designed theirs the same way only have the checkbox for, "no awkward buttons," or "button less freedom," or whatever else that gives them one more yes than Sony. The purpose of these lists is to present the list of yours as having the most ticks, which gives an at-a-glance measure of its superiority. The information can be manipulated in all sorts of ways to get the required ends.
