More reactions to the Information Week Credibility of Analysts article

Interesting take on InformationWeek's Credibility of analysts really bland article from Mike Rothman on his pseudo-blog (he does not allow comments):

• Educated end users need to know the context of a report (is it sponsored or not?) and treat the information accordingly.
  
• Having an analyst participate in vendor web casts, etc. is doing a service to the user community. Any analyst says a vendor's stuff is great on a own web cast is an idiot.
  
• There was no substantiation of the "small vendors only get covered if they are clients" claim.
  

IW had a great opportunity to educate their readers on how and when analysts can add value. Instead, they focused on old rumors and innuendo of bias. IW, if you are going to go on a witch hunt, you better find some witches. They are out there, and exposing clear instances of bias would have been interesting. They should have used the space to show clear examples of bias. That would have been interesting.

Duncan also commented on the same subject: ANALYST EQUITY: Research suggests Karma beats conspiracy:

• In outline form, Aberdeen's story is the same as in every Greek tragedy: pride; error; downfall; insight. Balancing between users and vendors is a difficult and dangerous job: few succeed for obvious reasons. As the Italians say, "He who serves two masters must lie to one of them."
• So we think that InformationWeek is right to point out the tensions; and we think that most analyst firms that try to serve both buyers and sellers do so at their peril. However, we also think that buyers and vendors both wise up to that reality quickly.