"Consultants: These guys are your best bets as moderators. Get a well-known consultant on your side early, but don’t let him publish anything blatantly pro-Microsoft. Then, get him to propose himself to the conference organizers as a moderator, whenever a panel opportunity comes up."

--Internal Microsoft document

For background, we must return to an old discussion about 'Über' analysts and oracles, whose word of mouth is grossly overrated by the mainstream press and therefore affects people's minds as well (public perception). To kick off this post, here is an article from last year about the San Jose Mercury, which was grabbed by Bill Gates through funds (it's only the tip of the iceberg. The article also presents some good portions about analysts:

The story, headlined “New study shows analysts getting favors,” reported on conflicts of interest among Wall Street investment firms. The article presented the findings of a study that found that “the more a company’s earnings slipped below analysts’ consensus forecasts, the more favors the company’s executives showered on the analysts covering it—especially at big investment firms.”

The (dis)integrity of analysts and their role in industry is truly intriguing and we'll continue to explore that.

This brings us to some minor news. Burton Group, the firm behind Microsoft's anti-Google and anti-ODF 'studies' [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24], has just 'passed' someone to Novell.

Amie brings great experience to Novell. Before joining us she ran worldwide PR for Burton Group, a leading IT analyst firm with a large and well-respected security/identity practice.

Burton Group? "Well-respected" practice? As in, selling studies in exchange for lucrative consulting contracts? There are some Burton Group 'genes' inside Novell now, not just more Microsoft 'genes'.

Speaking of analysts/consultants, whatever comes from Redmonk ought to be taken with a level of caution, apprehension, and suspicion. According to this post from a couple of days ago, this open source analyst firm has Microsoft as a client and we recently explained how Microsoft uses money to spread the impression that it plays ball with 'open source'. Bruce Perens wrote about it last week in relation to Microsoft's latest open source scam (Windows-restricted 'open source'). Microsoft hasn't ended this charade, which is becoming a norm. Say hello to Microsoft's so-called "Open-Source SDK."

The SDK only works on Windows (what did you expect?).

The OSI should really start policing the Open Source 'brand' more properly. The news feeds for 'open source' are already littered with fakers, which dilute the impact and power of "open source". At the end of the day, such a dilution serves Microsoft well for the same reason that killing ISO has helped Microsoft dismiss standards and have the whole process collapse. ⬆

"Analysts sell out - that’s their business model... But they are very concerned that they never look like they are selling out, so that makes them very prickly to work with."

--Microsoft, internal document