On Sat, 2003-09-13 at 11:26, Michael Scherer wrote: > and everything in a timeframe of 8 h. Given the fact that mandrake > direction does not read slashdot every minutes, this is acceptable. > In fact, mandrake listened to their complaints. And this is good.
It's not "acceptable" at all. You seem to be seeing this as some kind of point scoring exercise and ignoring the bigger picture, which is whether this whole thing has worked to Mandrakesoft's advantage. Which it obviously happened. The fact that they did not foresee that the corporate page aimed at advertisers would be discovered and reported by users' news sites is a massive failure of foresight; any competent company should have done so. The *CONSEQUENCE* of this, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, is that the news broke in a way that was terrible for Mandrakesoft's public credibility, and this is, in hard business terms, their own damn fault. They won't get any sympathy by complaining about OSNews being too fast or whatever. The way they should have done this was to have a press release publicising the new direction - from their OWN point of view - ready and have released that SIMULTANEOUSLY WITH - or even before - the page on the corporate site. If they'd got the retaliation in first, so to speak, and made the level of advertising that will be in 9.2 much clearer - which they have, belatedly, done - and made an absolute commitment to limit the level of advertising in future products - which they still haven't done - the whole thing wouldn't have been nearly as bad for them as it has been. -- adamw
