It's interesting to see this exchange, though, because it's high-trust: I would bet the professor's initial letter was courteously written, and asked if there w

It's interesting to see this exchange, though, because it's high-trust: I would bet the professor's initial letter was courteously written, and asked if there were other factors besides purely surface area to volume. The responder wrote a clear technical letter without any marketing flim-flam. We are in a golden age of communication in some sense, with blogs and technical online communities. But I could hardly imagine getting a letter from a corporation of this quality.