”Biased information can be bought and procurement typically boils down to personal relationship and moneyflows.“Despite Novell's arguably pathetic state, there is one analyst out there who boosts their stock. But what does that mean? Analysts get about half of their predictions wrong. Later on they bother to mention only the few things they coincidentally got right. They rarely try to make a correct prediction as much as they try to just serve their costumer well enough by handing over the required (and selective) figures/results. A pleased costumer will come again for another gig, so being brutally honest can sometimes be a poor business decision to an analyst. Remember this: it's dishonest reports/studies that are most difficult to earn, so they can be bought instead.
Microsoft controls the analysts just as it controls bloggers (astroturfing), controls the press (investments), and controls individual journalists (advertising and other pressures). Consider the fact that Microsoft brought its money even to academia in order to discredit the GPLv3. There was almost no disclosure about the funding in sight, proving that even figures of unquestionable authority can be corrupted by the money. This was far from the first time such an incident got identified. Microsoft's money injections into academic research has led to some embargoes before. Then, consider Microsoft's use of analysts in contexts that relate to this Web site's theme alone. Let's restrict scope and set our sight only on IDC and Gartner. These are merely 2 examples, among many more.
”Interestingly enough, Microsoft seems to have just assigned Gartner to be its 'Windows Vista salesman'.“On another note, which is unrelated to or at least separate from this podcast, it turns out that IDG (a very major media company that writes about GNU/Linux) is owned by IDC. No wonder the press is so biased, but we already knew about the Gates Foundation 'buying' the press in the form of individual media companies.
Interestingly enough, Microsoft seems to have just assigned Gartner to be its 'Windows Vista salesman'. Only a couple of days ago, Michael Silver, who is extremely close to Microsoft, used his 'Gartner analyst' hat in order to call for Vista adoption. He even used scare tactics to achieve this. Here is a headline:
Buy Vista or die [says Microsoft's friend from Gartner]
Gartner research vice president Michael Silver said that outfits have delayed their Vista migrations to the point of stupidity and now some are considering late 2008 or even 2009, while others mull skipping the OS completely.
PDF], as revealed in internal Microsoft documentsPDF], exposed using internal Microsoft E-mails
Image from Wikimedia