Microsoft FUD vs IBM Customer Value

I often feel sorry for IBM,  they have some great technology, but the marketing too often seems to fall sort.  They always seem to be in a reactive stance trying to compete against Microsoft FUD, rather than pumping out their own positive message.  Now I want to be clear I agree that there is a lot of FUD around,  I just wish I saw more positive marketing.  With these feelings in mind I was interested to come across this blog, with the challenging title of “Microsoft FUD vs IBM Customer Value”.  Well I am disappointed for a few reasons:

• it’s reactive again
• the quality of the presentation is pretty low, especially for a site that aims to present a corporate – customer value image,  this is not just a tech blog.  Look at this post as an example.  It’s not well presented or formatted.
• it’s really boring,  no graphics to help break up the text or improve understanding
• there are almost no comments, it’s absolutely essential to have a balanced readership with well argued comments,  they provide much more authority to the post.  Oh correction I found two comments “this link is broken” and “please fix the text wrapping on this post”.
• there are too few posts, if the Chief Competitive Marketing Officer can only find 5 things to talk about in over a month then there is definitely something wrong
• it seems to contain FUD itself, for example when you see comments like “Here are some reasons why at least one customer has shied away from SharePoint Portal Server 2003” – give me a break “at least one customer” – hardly a representative sample! This is exactly the sort of thing you critisize Microsoft for.  It weakens your argument considerably regardless of the validity of your content.

When I see the amazing hype and passion that is generated around Microsoft products and the huge amount of high quality information that gets pumped out by marketing but now more importantly bloggers IBM seems to really pale by comparison.  Of course Microsoft gets plenty of criticism, but they are out there in the open having the debate.

I personally am fortunate to have a great sales team supporting me and sending me some good quality information,  but to be frank I prefer to get content from blogs where I also get access to the discussion and debate!