[bjtitus]

The amount of time spent in this specific instance is irrelevant. The fact that they were interested enough to put any effort into such a trivial argument and the way they responded is the issue.

This kind of response is a double-edged sword. The majority of comments in this thread seem to support the idea as a marketing ploy and that is fine. However, the other side of damaging the company's reputation & culture needs to be considered.

I do not want to deal with companies who make it a common practice to respond to slight arguments with long posts and websites instead of dealing with more important support issues, features, and bug fixes.

Time is a tradeoff. It's a finite resource that needs to be used wisely. It reflects poorly on your company (especially an early stage startup) when you publicly spend it doing things like this.

If either of these companies are serious about their products they would not be spending time responding to trivialities like this and would let the customers and product speak for themselves.