Getting the perspective right in IT reportage can be tricky. On a big story — picking up the interstellar equivalent of Tomorrow's World from Betelgeuse, say — it's easy. But what do you do with stories from companies that, one suspects, not even they quite believe?
Take Symantec. After much reflection, it has announced that due to increasing popularity the Macintosh will be the next new target for virus writers. Well, of course it will — Mac users have secrets too. That's no reason to think the platform will succumb.
Despite a handful of potential problems and a few proof-of-concept programs, OS X remains a well-designed, fundamentally secure operating system. It's provided in a sane, locked-down configuration. Such potential problems as exist are fixed before any sign of trouble — and there's no reason to suspect that this would change if a hundred times as many Mac minis were sold. Could it be that Symantec makes antivirus products, and has failed to sell any to Apple users because they just don't need them?
Then there's Microsoft. So pleased is it with the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors' recent disposal of Linux in favour of Windows, that it called the press in just to celebrate the fact. Lowered costs and better service, don't you know?
Only that wasn't quite the case: while it was outsourced, the server ran Linux because that was what the outsourcing company used. The RICS is Windows through and through, so that's what it ran its server on when it brought the service back inside. The move to Windows was cheaper than keeping Linux, but only for the reason that it's cheaper to hire an English speaker for a post in Britain than hire a monoglot Uzbek and get the entire company to learn the language. Could it be that Microsoft's desire to sell its story outstretches the facts available?
Such attempts to persuade fall flat. They didn't cut much mustard back in the days of paper press releases and monthly magazines, when user feedback involved ticking boxes on a registration card. Now, when online publications include reader forums and there are a thousand discussion areas in which the irritated gather their arguments, the amount of mustard harvested has fallen to below subsistence level. Quite the opposite: making a loud noise about nothing much merely highlights the vacuity at the heart of the proposal.
In the words of Dr Jerry Ehman, the person responsible for detecting mankind's best candidate for an alien radio signal and thus someone who knows about putting perspective on a story: "Don't draw vast conclusions from half-vast data". You'll look somewhat less than half-vast yourself.
Talkback
Very true and a good analysis of some of the stories this week...
Which begs the question, why didn't ZDNet do this investigation on the stories in the first place before placing them on their site, why wait for the ridicule of the readers to rubbish the story before publishing a rebutal story about the fact the original used skewed data?
ZDNet used to be a very good on-line news site, and has been my homepage for years, but the pure marketing hype that is getting published here without comment, and often the stories are clearly marketing tripe, sorry hype, and lower the tone of the site and also ZDNet's overall credibility.
ZDNet, please read the comments in this article before rolling out the next load of marketing tripe unadulterated and making yourself look half-vast.
I didn't like tripe when my mum served it up to me when I was a kid, and I like the online variety that seems to get pumped out on a regular basis even less.
Seize your professional journalistic scrupals up from the floor when they seem to have fallen of late and use them to fend off the hyperbole and report the true stories. If the story is clearly a marketing puff-piece with little or no basis in fact, say so in the article, don't wait for your readers to point out to you that it is a puff piece, it makes you look bad, you're supposed to be the journalists here, you are supposed to do the investigating to make sure the story is credible before publishing it!