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.