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Readers' Choice Awards (siteadm) Fri, 13 Jun

Predictions and predilections

Posted by: CRConrad
Date posted: Wed Jun 18 3:59:48 PDT 1997

Well, Rachel, as you've noticed, one of the big issues here is the entire tone, style and composition of Infoworld's reporting.
Basically, what many of us are saying is that the reader is subject to a barrage of "info", often just FUD and vapour, on Microsoft and Windows.
In the previous after-poll forum, Sandy Reed tried to justify this with words to the effect that "NT is incontrevertibly the trend of the future".
She didn't seem to want to understand that if this is so, then it is to a large extent precisely _because_ of your, and other trade magazines', coverage.
You are participating in creating a self-fulfilling prophecy here, and not all agree that it shows the true, or even a _desirable_ future for IT as well as IS.
(Yes, BTW, I think khasim's or whoever it was "circular reasoning" is correct and you failed to disprove it, to _my_ satisfaction anyway.)

Another of ms Reed's attempts at justification was that an independent study (by the Gartner Group or some such) "proved" NT to be _the_ OS
of the future. It showed -- she claimed -- that a few years hence NT Server would rule the department, or was it perhaps the entire enterprise.
Well, this was more or less equally valid as the independent study of "Wisconsin on the Internet" posted elsewhere in this forum. :-)

"It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future", you know. Her belief in that particular report is all the more touching retrospectively,
in the light of the recent forum here on InfoWorld Electric where the very _title_ was something like "When did you stop believing in predictions?" . . .

Another tidbit is the recent Infoworld Electric article "Study finds NT appeals mostly to small companies",
by Joanne Taaffe. I think you can find it at http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?970611.estudy.htm .

In that article, it is shown that medium- and large-size companies don't yet trust NT for their more critical needs.
I would have thought that IW's "target audience of IS managers" is to be found precisely in the midsize or larger companies.
Small companies often don't _have_ any "IS managers", as such, at all!

The article is, by the way, yet another example of IW's increasingly slanted reporting style. It says something like:
"This doesn't sound an imminent death knell for Netware" -- strongly implying that it _is_ a foregone conclusion, only slightly postponed.
Further down, when we get to hard figures, it says that only in 1999 (or 2000?) will NT even have the _same_ installed base as Netware!
That's pretty far from _any_ death knell for Netware, imminent or not, isn't it?!?

And yes, I know the words, as printed, seem to come from the interviewee, a mr Hughey (sp?).
But to what degree were these words put into his mouth by IW? We'll never really _know_ that.
What we _do_ know is that they, and not some other phrases he might have uttered, were _selected_ for publication.
He might quite possibly also have said something more positive, but less "catchy", about alternative[1] OSes.
How can we readers know any more what slant and biases your editorial processes introduce?


Sincerely,


Christian R. Conrad


[1] I use the word against my better judgment; it's yet _another_ example of InfoWorld's slanted editing.
I'm sick and tired of articles entitled "Alternatives to NT" etc, comparing NT to operating systems such as OS/2, Unix, etc.
Since NT is the as yet unproven contender, it is _that_ which is the "alternative" to the so far more entrenched competitors.
Phrasing like that suggests NT is the default, and other systems are deviations from the "standard", to be explicitly justified.


Good points (rparker) Today

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