First: I did not downvote your node (I gave it a ++ because you raised a good point). Second, while you may be tired of "they have a better PR firm" comments, that doesn't make them untrue. And no, I don't think O'Reilly counts. How many O'Reilly books sit on the PHBs shelf? On the other hand, how many "Learn IT Management through short articles" type of magazines are there? Many, if not most, of those magazines are filled with puff pieces.

One of my best friends worked for many years with XXX, the PR firm for YYY (I deleted the names because it dawned on my that dropping them might not be wise from a litigation standpoint), and it was fascinating to hear how they worked. First, the PR person assigned to an account would learn what the selling points of a product were and, if the PR person was competant, might learn about similar points of competitors products. Then, much of their job would be scanning trade publications for "unfavorable" articles and demand equal space, or send out puff pieces about the product in question (which often get printed verbatim - Wall Street Journal is often guilty of this, I understand) and try to arrange interviews. When you see the VP of Acme Corp being interviewed, quite often that interview was set up by an anonymous PR person calling the magazine and saying "we have someone you might want to talk to."

It was also fun listening to tales of large corporations threatening to pull advertising if unfavorable reviews were received, or sometimes the advertisers would receive advance notice of unfavorable reviews so they could pull their advertising for an issue or so. This goes on all the time and I think it's fair to say that Larry and Friends don't have the desire, or money, to play that game.

Oh, and I'm a little embarrassed at how paco got out of hand :)

Cheers,
Ovid

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