Many of you watch, participate in and gather information through watching Webinars. Many Webinars are even co-branded by several well-known IT and public sector magazines with respected editors as moderators.
However, the truth is that while publications may be putting their names on the line with their sponsors, the publications are not performing the due diligence or fact checking that would be done for any story posted on their web site or published in their print versions.
Many of you probably know, but I wanted to remind you, that most of the Webinars you see are nothing but glorified advertisements...one-sided discussions funded by the company whose logo is usually part of the Webinar title and whose executives are the major participants.
Yet, even advertisements should be held to certain minimal standards. The most minimal standard being – telling the truth. Recently, HP purchased and produced a Webinar with eWEEK that focused on Solaris to Linux – The Path of Painless Migration.
Now, I fully understand all good marketing strategies “spin” messages and highlight your company’s positives while focusing on your competitors’ negatives. Many times the positive aspects about a competitor are omitted. However, competitor characteristics should not be misrepresented.
The recent HP Webinar stated that Sun’s Solaris operating system is not open sourced. Someone might want to tell the more than 11 million people who have downloaded the Open Solaris operating system or the more than 60 thousand members of our Open Solaris Project.
The HP Webinar also stated that shipments of Sun’s SPARC servers were declining and cited a 2005 IDC report. Yet, wouldn’t you think you would quote the 2006-07 IDC report, which is already available? The current report states that SPARC shipments are actually increasing. But, I guess HP doesn’t want the facts to get in the way.
These inaccuracies are just the tip of the iceberg. Many other untruths, including the notion that Solaris is more expensive than HP, were propagated in the HP Webinar, so I would like to call on my friendly counterparts at HP to contact me and discuss it in depth.
The truth is, for the same hardware, at the same support level (two socket X86 server for three years), HP is $1059.84 and Open Source Solaris is $599.00. I don't know what kind of math HP is using, but the last time I checked, $599.00 was less than $1,059.84. Maybe HP is starting to have trouble with their calculators, or maybe it's just that Reverse Polish Notation.
I also call on publications, as the wall between advertising and editorial becomes more porous, to protect their reputations by performing more thorough reviews of their branded Webinar content – especially when their reporters are moderators!!
As a company that invests in Webinars, I welcome similar scrutiny of our Webinar content by our publication partners. At Sun, we have one requirement for all written, verbal and video content -- claims are backed by facts.
I’d like to talk to our competitors to advise them on how to launch such an initiative.
Now to dispel some other myths about Solaris, take a look at Jim Laurent's blog.
