[mike_hearn]

You're welcome!

My experience has been that large companies won't directly argue with academic research, even when they easily could. Most people will automatically side with academics in any dispute, because they'll intuit that of course the company would say there's no real problem, they're conflicted, whereas the researchers aren't so the latter must be correct. Many people aren't too savvy about the publish-or-perish problem and don't care about the details. Corporate PR people also hate picking public fights, so tell staff to just roll with it and engage in damage control. After all, you're arguing with people who can literally spend all day writing up clever sounding papers about why their claimed problem is real, whereas you have customers to satisfy.