Someone is paying attention

It’s nice to see that, while most of the tech press seems happy to copy/paste from misleading press briefing documents rather than do any checking of their own, some analysts take a little bit more time to look through the smoke. So, when Gartner looks into the recent Microsoft/Sun announcement (see “Progress Report on Sun/Microsoft Initiative Lacks Substance”) their recommendation is to “view the latest Sun/Microsoft announcement as primarily public-relations-oriented”. Similar take from Jason Bloomberg from ZapThink who thinks that this “doesn’t do anything to contradict the fact that Microsoft is the big gorilla in this relationship”. And Forrester’s Randy Heffner (quoted in “Analysts Question Microsoft-Sun Alliance”) thinks that “Bottom line: Web services interoperability is not yet part of the picture”. Oh, and by the way “the WS-Management group has yet to come clean on how they will work with the WSDM standard approved by OASIS,” Heffner also says. “Again, WS-Management is still just a specification in the hands of vendors”. Very much so. But in PR-land everything looks different. As tech journalists write these articles including insight from analysts that contradict what the tech press reported a couple days earlier, I wonder if they ever think “hum, maybe I should be the one doing reality checks on the content of press releases rather than going around collecting quotes and then the analysts would focus on real in-depth analysis rather than just doing the basic debunking work…”