Radicati Report, Employee Actions and Ethical Behavior
Ed
Brill's personal log has been
humming
lately with discussion of
the Radicati
Group Report on Messaging.
What this discussion has skirted around and not come out directly and said
is how the lack of ethics, or at least the perceived lack, plays into situations
such as these. Moreover, what should the ethical bar be set at when it
comes to software reviews?
A few weeks ago, I had an e-mail exchange with a senior vice-president
at Oklahoma State University (one of the "white hats" there)
. We talked about ethics when it comes to computing resources, software
and the like. It was an interesting discussion.
It is very hard to distinguish what is a real, unbiased evaluation of a
product. How many people realize that when they read a profile of a resort
in a dive magazine, that 'article' has been bought and paid for by the
resort. Advertisers in the magazines are then paying for space to print
an article placed by another advertiser. Granted, journalistic rules do
not apply, but should they? Should all product reviews, white papers and
the sort include a disclaimer if the paper has been sponsored or paid for
in part by the company being written about? Is it right that people who
go to the Radicati web site are told that to buy this report, which was
paid for by Microsoft and includes numerous references to nonexistent vaporware,
they have to fork over US$2,500? Should there not be a disclosure that
the same report is available free on the paying vendor's web site? (Update
- it is now available for free download on the Radicati site).
How about the Radicati employee that e-mailed Ed Brill, but refused to
offer any comment rebuttal on Ed's blog? For a person supposedly savvy
in technology, did he/she not realize it would not take Ed long to realize
that the two "posters" on his blog that offered negative, nasty
comments were one in the same as the person that sent him the e-mail? What
view does Radicati take of this employee's actions. For an outside observer
of the exchange, it is a material business control weakness on the part
of Radicati, and by extension Microsoft, that only damages their already
sullied reputation. Unfortunately, there will be people that will read
this and other "unbiased" publications and accept it as truth.
A few years back, there was a study commissioned and paid for by both IBM/Lotus
and Microsoft to do a head to head rapid application development taste
test. When the results did not go the way of Microsoft, they blasted the
report and attacked the skills, knowledge and methodology of the company
that did the test. How ethical was this?
I commend Ed for taking a higher road than he could have. He could easily
have "outed" the emailer/blog poster publicly for public vilification,
but as of this writing he has not.
Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) are too often used as marketing tools. And too many mainstream publications are citing reports that have no validity. So if you know anybody who is citing these publications and reports to make business decisions, please point them to one or more of these links. You can also point them to the "Fighting FUD" index of stories and/or add the "Fighting FUD" graphic link to your web site.

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