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Monday, August 25, 2008

Trash talking is such bad taste

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As you know, I use Summize (now part of Twitter) to follow what the world thinks about Lotus Connections (good or bad). Throught that real-time feed I've gotten to meet key people at our competitors' organizations. It also gives me a chance to correct any FUD that they may be creating. If you are following me on Twitter, you also know that I was recently disappointed with our competitors using our anonymous forums to trash talk about our products and, worse, simply by copying and pasting existing blogs that were over 1 year old!!!

Now, I know that the IBM social computing guidelines prevent me from picking fights. Thus, you'll notice that I won't mention names or anything like that .

In one case, I wanted to comment on one of the blogs from our competitors. In the blog, our competitor discussed why one of the Lotus Connections components is no good because it's missing one feature. So simply because it's missing a single feature, a product is no good ?

This particular competitor doesn't have a social bookmarking component like Lotus Connections. Does that mean that their product sucks? That it's horrible? That it's poorly designed? No. It just means that their software meets a different business need than we do. That's why it's important to define the business goals before considering an enterprise social software implementation.

Anyway, guess what? When I tried to comment on the blog, I had to register and wait for my comment to be approved. Isn't that anti-social ? Shoulnd't a social software vendor be more social ?

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