the corner office

Julian and I probably are related; it looks like the first Robichaux in North America stepped ashore in 1640 or so, and most of us who are here now are descended from him.

I was going to write a more detailed analysis about exactly what I found objectionable about Ed's post, but you know what? That won't help move the discussion forward, so I'll skip it. In fact, I have considerable professional respect for Ed: he does a terrific job of consistently advocating and evangelizing his products, <i>generally</i> in a "highbrow" manner. In this case, I thought he hit below the belt, and I called him on it. I'm sure my visitors will return the favor.

It's funny, this particular episode doesn't exactly represent the most extreme situation in terms of extracting and spinning information coming out of Redmond. I recently flashed back to an early presentation about Exchange 2000 that talked about it then-much-hyped front-end/back-end architecture. The speaker notes were still in the PPT, and they specifically instructed the speaker to lie. MS wanted to lead the reader to believe that the FE/BE config would help E2K scale, but asked the speaker to leave out the bit about MAPI being unsupported in that config. It specifically said "We do not want customers to know..." I had that slide in my own presentations for a while, so that customers would know that MS was deliberately trying to deceive them about E2K. There were other examples in that era as well.
So in the grand scheme of things, shining a spotlight on poor technical support responsiveness doesn't feel like a major transgression. I have to wonder if the lack of responses to Paul's postings - on my blog, his blog, Scobleier, and here - indicate whether the majority saw what I was really after and didn't see it as "below the belt."