Richard BF

The company I work for, Synop,
does a lot of R&D, particularly in the CMS and microcontent space. We
developed one of the leading RSS readers for .NET, Sauce Reader, which isn’t our end
game, but at least gets our fingers into the blogging space. We’ve
always been a microcontent company, so although we feel like we belong
in the space more than most, Sauce Reader is actually designed with
additional purposes in mind.

Anyway, I did a quick review of CNet’s new Newsburst aggregator the
other day, and posted it on my Synop blog. While not a
direct competitor with our core R&D, they are heading in our direction,
and of course they do compete directly with Sauce Reader.

So then someone on the Newsburst team comes to my blog and thanks me
for my comments, and then asks for any additional feedback I may have,
and areas in which they could improve. This is great, it opens a dialog
up with a possible customer, and whether he realises it, a partial
competitor. Very Scoblesque of both of us, if I may coin a phrase, to
positively review a competitor in public.

But here’s the rub. How much feedback do I give? If any? And how much
of that should be on company time? We have a lot of IP in this space,
and it would be very easy for me to throw a few nice ideas their way,
just to keep the discussion alive, but traditionally you’d just shut the
fuck up really.

Scoble talks about almost anything being open for discussion, except
for confidential company IP like new products etc. Others would say
everything should be open. However this isn’t always as black and white
as people suggest. A grey area exists between embracing the chasm, the
long tail, the blogosphere, and keeping quiet about what we’re working
on. There’s no real guide, and I guess we have to make our own decisions
as to what we do and say.

As for Newsburst, I do wish them luck. Who knows, one day we could be
big competitors, or even partners. More likely, one of us won’t sync up
with whatever direction the industry takes.

There’s a saying in show business: The people you meet on the way up,
are the same ones you meet on the way back down. It’s another one of my
life mantras.