The Value Of Criticism

CMSWire: Vendor Criticism of CMS Watch

In an industry whereby most of the “independent analysts” are heavily dependent on revenues from the very firms they claim to be “independent” of, it’s unusual to see truly critical research get published. So it becomes a surprise to both buyers and sellers when they read such criticism. In our reports we widely distribute the compliments and brickbats — if something is truly terrible we will tell you.

The way I see it, criticism is one of the most important things a product company can receive – particularly in an aggregated, general form like an analyst report tends to give you. It lets you identify areas you need to improve in that are actually affecting clients rather than the ones that seem important to you.

The first thing I do when I get a new vendor report is to search through it for any mentions of Ephox (it’s amazing how often we turn up in reports about web content management systems) and see what they didn’t like so we can work out how to fix it. Then I go through and find the general trends in the report etc to establish a wider industry direction and market opportunities etc.