fishdan's Journal: How corrupt is SlashDot

When I was working for a PDA company (call us Lamp), I had the opportunity to go to our big user/developer conference in 2000. One of the fascinating things there was to see how much a certain other competing company (call them Costformi) felt threatened by Lamp then. Lamp has gone on to become mostly irrelevant as a player in the consumer electronic space, but in 2000 things looked bright.

Costformi hired CS thugs to disrupt the conference. These guys were very bright, sat through conferences and then asked very tough, good technical questions, to which the answers always were "You can't do that yet on a Lamp device" and to which they always responded "I can do it right now on my *(PDA running another OS)*!" All the geeks were kinda stunned that someone would be such a jerk, and noone really said anything. 3 days into the conference, Costformi had a "traitor's party" where they invited talented developers to a local party, and wooed them to develop for the Costformi platform.

3 months later, in relating this story to a product manager who used to work at Flower123, I found out that it used to happen at their conventions too. These random developers would come in and disrupt the meetings, spread wild info, and ask if the latest FlowerSuite could do this that and the other, and then compare it to Costformi products

I don't think people realize that this is clearly happening on /. too. Think how many people who read /. make IT purchasing decisions for companies. Now think about how much Costformi (and other companies) bashing goes on here.

Costformi, and other large companies would be crazy to NOT hire a few people whose only jobs are to read /. and post stories and comments that portray their products in a better light. You couldn't ask for a better targetted advertising group, and it would be pretty cheap!

I'm not saying that there aren't some overboard comments (Costformi products for example do not actually curdle all milk within 25' when installed on a computer), but does anyone else think that as sales have gotten tighter in the last year, we've seen more "apologists" posting and replying. Does anyone know of any other incidences of a company like Costformi or someone else trying to influence a bulletin board? Maybe my perception is off? Does anyone else see this?

I'm not quite dead!

[ChaosDiscord]

Lamp has gone on to become mostly irrelevant as a player in the consumer electronic space, but in 2000 things looked bright.

I'd hardly call 36% of the worldwide market irrelevant [gartner.com], especially given that when you add in the Sony licenses it's going to be at least 48%. I suspect if you add in the other licensees that Palm based PDAs have the majority of the market.

Has Palm's marketshare dropped? Yes. Have they got challenges ahead? Absolutely. Is the race over? By no means. I think they're wasteful,