Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Guide to Hating Competitors

So, inspired by Andrew Hay post (here), I figured I'd expand a bit and create "A Brief Guide to Hating Competitors," a marvelous piece of vendor propaganda :-)

Indeed, many of my fellow vendors are fun and smart people, some are also friendly :-). Sharing technology and sometimes even market insight with them - while having your competitive market positions and IP concerns in mind - is perfectly fine, in my estimation.

However, there are certain vendor behaviors that, in my world, can trigger a prolonged hatred. These are (ALL were observed in real world - some not by myself...)
  1. Super-unethical selling: fake references (I saw a vendor give a phone number of their own sales engineer as "here is a number for our reference government customer"...), direct and known lies, etc
  2. Hacking the competitor's website and other online resources (e.g. support site) or accessing them using stolen credentials
  3. Stealing evaluation gear/software from a side by side eval project at a prospect site
  4. Other examples of direct IP theft (once I saw this done using a VC firm as a cover)
  5. A few other things that SCIP folks would frown at.
Any additions? Thoughts?

UPDATE: fun follow-up post from Mike (and a bit more here) with more nefarious activities by vendors ... Yuck!

Dr Anton Chuvakin