No more Mister Nice Guy

We've had an interesting 24 hours with the CMSWatch saga since Carl Tyler first broke the story about the Adriaan Bloem's assertion that IBM was phasing out Notes.

Adriaans response was completely inadequate - he complained that when he wrote 'fact', people thought he meant a 'fact' when actually he didn't. Then his colleague wrote a weasel word retraction claiming that Adriaan 'mis-spoke' when the truth was that Adriaan just didn't bother to check the truth. Now (in comment 13 of Carl's original post) Adriaan is asking if he can borrow a VM Image of Notes to get some experience with the product.

So how can CMSWatch consider themselves competent to write and sell IT industry reports when they have such an enormous chasm in their staff's education. These guys position themselves as vendor-neutral technology experts (I quote from their website: "CMS Watch™ evaluates content-oriented technologies, publishing head-to-head comparative reviews of leading solutions."), yet they seem to have paper-thin technical expertise with regard to Sharepoint's biggest competitor and (apparently) don't have any in-house Notes resources who can help sort out Adriaan's confusion.

So well done Carl for putting CMSWatch on the spot so they could get the caning they so richly deserved. It may not change their product bias but it will make them think twice the next time they want to regurgitate the old Microsoft mantras. I suggest the same 'Boots And All' treatment is applied to any other professional publishers who take the same shortcuts. NOTE: I do not condone abuse or other unprofessional behavior - I am talking about flooding offenders with accurate comments to show where they are wrong and not putting up with weasel word replies.

No more Mister Nice Guy!

OK... OK... the Horse is dead. I'll stop flogging it.


EDIT: The intrepid Michael Sampson has pointed out to me the difference between CMSWire and CMSWatch.

• CMSwatch is the analyst house who penned the Sharepoint Report and also hosted the writings of Adriaan Bloem.

• CMSWire is a totally different organization founded by Brice Dunwoodie.

I have, at times, confused the two - mea culpa. I apologize to CMSWire for my mistake.
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The CMSWatch Emperor has no Clothes

Carl Tyler set the cats among the pigeons when he blogged about CMSWatch's article on 'The Difference between SharePoint and Lotus Notes'. The original CMS post had stated

" ... the fact that IBM is slowly phasing out Domino in favor of newer platforms ... "

and they were quickly smothered by a plethora of Yellowverse comments deriding their lack of knowledge. CMSWatch quickly backpedalled and admitted that they just 'mis-spoke', however it was interesting that it wasn't the original author who issued the retraction and apology (providing you accept that using the weasel word 'mis-spoke' is actually an apology).

So do you think those antics are good enough for a professional advisory service? Most of us get paid nothing for our blogs and that's a fair wage. Now and again one of us generates something of real value (Declan's X-Pages tutorials come to mind as does every second or third post from Nathan Freeman) but the majority of PlanetLotus feeds are just the day-to-day technical soap operas of a bunch of us IT folk - and that's fine by me.

However these CMSWatch people expect you to pay for their opinions. They will sell you an intranet site licence for all of their reports for a cool $16,000 per year or only $950 if you just want to read the Basic Sharepoint Report. But how the heck can their Sharepoint report be of any value when they obviously know so little about the main competitor to Sharepoint?

The list of people featured on their webpage who recommend the Sharepoint report made for interesting reading:

• Barb Mosher, (Senior Editor, CMSWire.com ) ... would she be the person who reviews their work for publication under the CMSxxx brand? If so, then her comments do not constitute an independent review.
• Hugh McKellar, (Editor, KMWorld Magazine ) ... who had just held a joint webinar with CMSWorld about Sharepoint so there is an existing commercial relationship with that reviewer.
• Two quotes each from Michael Sampson ( President, The Michael Sampson Company Ltd) and Paul Culmsee, (IT Consultant, Clever Workaround) ... doubtless they are highly skilled people but their respective websites show that both of them are one-man band consulting outfits who sell Sharepoint consulting services, so once again we don't see evidence of independent review.

There were two other endorsements that I didn't check beyond the ten second scrutiny I gave to the people listed above, but when you combine their demonstrated lack of knowledge about Notes/Domino with the thinness of the Sharepoint Report reviewer's credentials then IMHO CMSWatch have a looooooooooong way to go before they can be taken seriously as 'impartial reviewers' in the collaboration space. These guys seem like Sharepoint Fellow-Travellers who just jumped aboard the 'Let's-bash-Notes' wagon before checking their facts. The problem is, people are probably buying and reading and believing their stuff these guys write.

'mis-spoke' ... what a great word!
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Y us crptc var nm?

There was an interesting article in Omninerd about the need for coding standards and, although you've probably heard most of it before, I'd be interested in feedback about one particular point - cryptic variable names.

We all do code maintenance and (I'm sure) we all encounter code which seems to make no sense at all until we mentally remap the existing variable names into something more understandable.

So why do people call a variable 'dtFHire' when they could name it 'DateOfFirstHire' (or even 'dtOfFirstHire')? Is it an anachronistic habit from days when memory was scarce and variable names limited in length? Is it because they don't like having their code run wordwrapping when they write:

WeeksOfLeaveAccumulated = ((LastPayDate - DateOfFirstHire)/NumberOfDaysInAWeek) * DailyLeaveAllowance) + BonusWeeksAccumulated - NumberIFirstThoughtOf

What is the reason?
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Is Symphony losing the 'hearts and minds' battle?

I use either Notes or Symphony for all of my business doc needs and I'm a firm believer that Symphony is a good investment for IBM and for users. The big problem I see for the product is that it seems to be marginalized by the reviewers. Look at this review by Infoworld which looks at the ongoing battle between Microsoft Office and Google Apps - not a mention of Symphony anywhere in the article.

I know that the current Google/Microsoft war for Apps and OS is sexier than the (yawn) ongoing IBM/Microsoft 100 Years War over email but use awareness is the name of today's game and IBM marketing needs to work harder and smarter to stay in the battle. Maybe if IBM followed Google's lead and provided a competitor to Windows and then put some marketing dollars behind it...
COUGHLotusFoundationsServerCOUGH...

No, I'm just dreaming...

Yes... I know about the 'Lotus Knows' campaign. That's a different type of marketing investment compared to getting the Symphony name into these product-specific reviews done by industry analysts.
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So this blonde walks into a bar ...

Well, not really, but I would guess that 99% of readers would interpret that title as an indication that this post contains a blonde joke... and they're right.

Last year I replaced all the computers in my office with those new energy efficient kind from IBM, and today I got a call from the IBM Business Partner who installed them. He was complaining that the work had been completed a whole year ago and I still hadn’t paid for them.

HELLLOOOOOOO…………..just because I’m blond doesn’t mean that I am automatically stupid.

So, I reminded him what his fast talking sales guy had told me then, that in ONE YEAR these computers would PAY FOR THEMSELVES!

Helllooooo……??? It’s been a year already!

There was only silence at the other end of the line, so I finally just hung up..

He never called back. I bet he felt like an idiot.

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Same Planet ... Different Worlds

I've been through two apparently unrelated incidents in the last 24 hours which have set me thinking that Earth is actually a multiverse with everyone living in their own reality.

Today's incident occured when I went to pick up a package from my Post Office. The attendant behind the counter was quite confrontational and said that I must have lost a notification that the postman had left in my letterbox. Despite my explanation that I had been eagerly checking my mailbox for this package (a new battery for my completely dead mobile phone) for the last week and I had not received any such notification, the attendant aggressively insisted that I was at fault. When I told him I was going to report his confrontational attitude to his management his reply was "You wouldn't do that if I was a white man". Anyway, I've now made the complaint and I'm happy to let the Australia Post Customer Service team review the video footage and decide what action to take. I can shrug off bad customer service but I don't take gratuitous accusations of racism from anybody. My question from that incident is how on earth did this man decide that a complaint about his customer service must be racially motivated?

Yesterday's event was equally baffling. I was at an IBM roundtable meeting which is where Big Blue invites selected Business Partners to chew the fat on selected topics and hopefully gain some consensus about the best direction to take on those issues. One of the key topics at that meeting was about negotiating commercial relationships between individual Business Partners and one of the people present didn't like the idea because (in his words) "I don't trust anybody".

OK, we've all been burned by people we trusted and I'm sure we could all name some business partners who are lacking in ethics. In my case I chose not to trust those who have screwed me in the past (you know who you are) but I'm certainly open to working with new faces on new opportunities. To hear a business person declare that they don't trust anybody seems completely out of this world. You want your customers to trust you, but you're not willing to trust anyone else... what's wrong with this picture?

Let me clarify that I have known this Partner for many years and he is a thoroughly decent person who deserves the success he has achieved. I'm just baffled by his decision not to trust anybody regardless of the circumstances.

Anyway, both of those incidents left me unable to see where the other person was coming from and I now need to (regretfully) walk away from spending more time figuring out what they were thinking.

Same Planet ... Different Worlds.
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Microsoft eliminates Blue Screen of Death!

Prevx reported today that the dreaded Blue Screen of Death has finally been eliminated from Windows. For Windows 7 (and future releases) the "Blue" screen has been upgraded to a "Black" screen of Death. A spokesman for Microsoft said:

"Customers have been complaining for years about the Blue Screen of Death so we finally acted to remove the problem while still retaining backward compatibility with the BSOD acronym. Note that this new feature will not decrease the frequency of the problem but it will bring comfort to millions of users who can see that we are in control of the situation."

Unconfirmed reports suggest that Microsoft has already made this feature available as a free upgrade for Vista and XP and slipstreamed it into an automatic update that ran in the last week of October.
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