Thursday, 23 December 2004

Embargos and tongue biting

On Tuesday, I posted to the Ferris blog about Exchange's strange lack of support for SPF/SenderID. At the end, I made an offhand comment about how "The Lotus community's scorn over the Exchange roadmap isn't entirely justified, but it seems to be getting louder by the day."

Boy, how to enrage a passionate community! See here, here, here, and here. And I thought I'd get away with it, 'cos Ed's on vacation? Nah...

The thing is, I knew more than I was letting on about the Edge Services roadmap (or lack thereof). But I had to be careful what I said, 'cos Ferris Research had agreed to an "embargo" (a kind of informal NDA). David Via also weighed in with a nice post, also during the embargo. The news wasn't announced until Wednesday 6pm my time. Chris Williams had written up a great post about it, which was all queued up to go once the embargo was lifted.

What's the blogging equivalent of biting one's tongue? Whatever it is, I was doing a lot of that all day.

4 comments:

Ed Brill said...

And why do you suppose they embargoed the news until three days before Christmas? Clearly this wasn't the most exciting announcement Microsoft had on tap. It's also strange given that the story of Edge Services' delay/demise has been leaking out for about eight weeks -- I knew about it in November.

Does agreeing to hold fire in this case make you look more or less credible? Embargos don't really work in the blogosphere.

Richi Jennings said...

I couldn't agree more, but when I'm wearing my Ferris hat, I play by David Ferris's rules. We generally respect reasonable embargo requests whether they're from Microsoft or from IBM.

In this case, the pre-announcement "chatter" in other spaces made it a tougher call. Hence the posts from me and DavidV.

Ed Brill said...

The bigger point remains -- it still doesn't look like much of a roadmap, and certainly not one built on any credibility.

Richi Jennings said...

I think you were right when you predicted a bigger announcement timed for Lotusphere.

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