Daring Fireball linked to Paul Krugman’s NY Times op-ed post which includes a great quote from Daniel Davies:
“Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.”
He was speaking of war, but it’s true of just about anything. Especially technology. A good idea just sells itself.
The first thing that comes to my mind is the mudslinging that Microsoft and Citrix are doing lately over virtualization. Why is it that VMware has 80% of the market? Because it sells itself.
I wonder why, instead of spending all this money on “get the facts” and “costs too much” web sites, Microsoft doesn’t just focus on why VMware keeps beating them, and fix it. Then, when they make one of their products a good idea, it’ll gain public acceptance on its own. Just like what happened with VMware.
Its a time tested tactic; mount a PR attack and then try to get the financial community to back away from the competitive front runner. The FUD way to success. The competitive product doesn’t arrive until the market has been sewn up.
Microsoft has so much marketing resource that it tends to take on a life of its own and go it own way – thus attacking weaknesses might be the only thing they can think of (possibly because they are not talking to the engineers…..).
On the other hand, the product is three years late, inferior to the competitors, and reasonably expensive (since it is bundled with Data Center licensing) and unproven. At this point, ANY exposure is worth having.
Lastly, this is Microsoft monopoly-style practice. As the incumbent they don’t have to better, they just have to look close enough to the best product to win. Bashing the other products might achieve that.
Greg
The corollary of course is the public cannot distinguish between good ideas and bad ideas with enough
liesmarketing behind them.This would of course explain many of the software choices made by manglement at my company.
Jesse
“Lastly, this is Microsoft monopoly-style practice. As the incumbent they don’t have to better, they just have to look close enough to the best product to win. Bashing the other products might achieve that.”
I think you hit the nail on the head. Long ago Novell’s eDirectory(formerly NDS) was far and away the king of directory services. Now, Active Directory has that distinction, even though eDir still beats the pants off of AD in many ways.
There’s also a common saying and theme when it comes to upper IT management, nobody ever got fired for picking Microsoft.