Wed. Jun. 04, 2008
Everybody pile on! One of the great things about Web 2.0 is that guys like Pedro Pereiro at eWeek think that they can be judge, jury and jailer - without having to investigate and know anything about what they are writing. Sorry Pedro, but as a guy who doesn't even allow comments on your posts, I don't think you are in any position to make judgments or throw stones on this one. Shoot, you don't even link to Xenochron's post so that people can read it for themselves. So get with it Pedro, that was a load.
Pedro assumes I was just being a corporate chimp, spewing the corporate line - but that's where he's got it wrong. The rep who covers Xenochron's territory thought I should have refuted Xenochron's claims more harshly, but as Xenochron and I have discussed since then, I have no way of knowing what every sales rep at Dell is doing at any given time. I don't think Pedro knows that I have frequent conversations with channel partners, customers and co-workers (including one named Michael) every now and then about our channel efforts and I can say that a move by an individual rep to circumvent the channel on an opportunity with Xenochron's company would best be described as a CLM.
Blog conversations can be like email, where wrong assumptions are made and the editing is minimal. Some things that start in public don't end there. I didn't know who Xenochron was when this surfaced, but as it turns out we have communicated before in the past - privately and publicly. I blogged about our most recent private discussions here. I'm OK with what Xenochron said, it was a passionate blog entry from a person who works in the trenches of technology. We have a lot in common.
But I'm not done with eWeek and Pedro's Web 2.0 posing. Not only did Pedro do a hatchet job on me, but a comment of mine on a recent eWeek blog post was censored and not posted. It was a short comment, something like: "And John who commented above works for Lefthand?" (The rollover on John's name was a giveaway.) For people that don't know, Lefthand is a competitor of Dell EqualLogic and occasionally their people show up in the blogosphere making little chippy comments like this without identifying who they are. I think people can usually see through that stuff, but I thought I'd call them on it this time. What bugged me is that I wasn't given the space for the briefest of equalizers. What's with that, eWeek?
So, Pedro and eWeek, you have a little 'splainin to do about the differences between practicing and preaching where Web 2.0 is concerned.