January 26, 2011

What technology influencers really think about certain PR tactics

The following is a transcript of an actual IM exchange I had a few hours ago.

Bottom line: PR shouldn’t be a pompous ass, either on its own behalf or the client’s.

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August 2, 2010

Further notes on ethics and analyst research

It’s been quite a weekend for discussion of analysts and ethics. A few more thoughts:

1.  The terms “ethics” and “ethical” are used somewhat inconsistently, along a spectrum from:

There are procedural rules of good behavior, and if you violate them that’s bad. That’s the essence of ethics.

to

Unless the motive was impure, an act was not unethical.

Either extreme, in my opinion, quickly leads to nonsense.

2. Actually, I think calling that a spectrum is a bit misleading. I’d prefer to say an act is unethical if:

Thus, somebody can make an error in the area of ethics and still be fully ethical if, upon realizing it, they straightforwardly correct it. On the other hand, a pattern of such “errors” can suffice to convict them of unethical behavior.

3.  In particular, I stand by the following views from the post and comment thread that set this all off:

4.  Merv’s analysis of white paper ethical issues was excellent, and supersedes mine. Continuing the oneupsmanship :), I’ll now try to synthesize by saying:  Read more

July 25, 2010

So who is an analyst anyway?

Recently, there have been several high-profile (at least within the independent analyst community) posts and initiatives relating to analyst business models. Each at least implicitly suggests a definition of what an “analyst” is. Interestingly, no two of the definitions seem exactly the same – even though similar people are involved in several of the efforts. 🙂 Notwithstanding my well-documented skepticism about category definitions, I think it might be interesting to pull some of these ideas together in one place.

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