Friday, January 19, 2007
Analyst Impartiality?
The folks over at ARmadgeddon posted an interesting entry on Industry Analyst Impartiality where they suggest that Industry analysts will increasingly be pressurised to disclose who pays them may become the norm. I wonder if they have thoughts on the best way this should be disclosed? The folks over at Redmonk probably have demonstrated more leadership in the analyst field than anyone else, so kudos to them. Do you think whenever an analyst research report provides information on vendors that it should be clearly delineated there?
I am of the belief that if they have to disclose payment from software vendors that analysts instead will stop talking about vendors and instead focus on products. This would give me exactly what I want as this would provide a level playing field for open source projects. As an employee of a Fortune 100 enterprise who is cognizant of all of the wonderful benefits that open source brings, I love the thought of having the ability to see proprietary commercial closed source offerings right next to 100% free open source projects. My interest in analyst research is to help solve business problems where the vendor is secondary concern.
The one statement that was troubling was the following:
This seems like an attack on small analyst firms and somewhat inaccurate. For example, I suspect that no one peer reviews James Governor blog except that it is peer reviewed every single day at least by me and hundreds of others folks in the blogosphere. Maybe this begs a strategy that defines how peer review could work in an open source way...
| | View blog reactionsI am of the belief that if they have to disclose payment from software vendors that analysts instead will stop talking about vendors and instead focus on products. This would give me exactly what I want as this would provide a level playing field for open source projects. As an employee of a Fortune 100 enterprise who is cognizant of all of the wonderful benefits that open source brings, I love the thought of having the ability to see proprietary commercial closed source offerings right next to 100% free open source projects. My interest in analyst research is to help solve business problems where the vendor is secondary concern.
The one statement that was troubling was the following:
- Journalists should do their homework. Like figuring out that a one-man-shop has little or no peer reviews and its coverage will follow more closely vendor briefings than their own research agendas.
This seems like an attack on small analyst firms and somewhat inaccurate. For example, I suspect that no one peer reviews James Governor blog except that it is peer reviewed every single day at least by me and hundreds of others folks in the blogosphere. Maybe this begs a strategy that defines how peer review could work in an open source way...
