Laura DiDio, a former CNN on-camera personality and a central figure in the paranormal investigation of the house that was the basis for the movie The Amityville Horror, eventually went on to work in market research for The Yankee Group and later spun off her own research group called ITIC. She was in a swirl of controversy during the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit when SCO was alledging that IBM had injected proprietary UNIX code into the Linux operating system. DiDio not only supported SCO strongly, but also spent a good deal of time publishing surveys and making comments to the press suggesting that Linux was the more costly server platform as compared to Windows due to the "total cost of ownership" (TCO). Microsoft, in turn, based much of their TCO-oriented marketing and PR around these findings.
Today, her ITIC company is producing results that show that Microsoft is a leader in the virtualization market and that any gap between Microsoft and VMware is vanishing while also suggesting that corporate users are "surprisingly satisfied" with Windows Vista.
The world of market research and the "recent surveys indicated" marketing phenomenon have really gotten out of control in the past 10 years. Now, most companies' marketing departments don't deal in the real perception of their products, but in the perception that can be crafted by paying for the right kinds of surveys. Of course, if you just go to someone and say, "I need research that says X, and I'm willing to pay Y amount for it," that's likely to come back to you later. Instead, you float ideas on what your marketing team "neads to know," and and market research organizations perform "independant research" which you then buy. It's the same result. You pay someone to come up with the data you wanted, but it looks cleaner to the casual observer.
DiDio is a master at this kind of stats-for-hire research, which is, I imagine, why she's formed her own company.
For further reading:
Today, her ITIC company is producing results that show that Microsoft is a leader in the virtualization market and that any gap between Microsoft and VMware is vanishing while also suggesting that corporate users are "surprisingly satisfied" with Windows Vista.
The world of market research and the "recent surveys indicated" marketing phenomenon have really gotten out of control in the past 10 years. Now, most companies' marketing departments don't deal in the real perception of their products, but in the perception that can be crafted by paying for the right kinds of surveys. Of course, if you just go to someone and say, "I need research that says X, and I'm willing to pay Y amount for it," that's likely to come back to you later. Instead, you float ideas on what your marketing team "neads to know," and and market research organizations perform "independant research" which you then buy. It's the same result. You pay someone to come up with the data you wanted, but it looks cleaner to the casual observer.
DiDio is a master at this kind of stats-for-hire research, which is, I imagine, why she's formed her own company.
For further reading:
- Laura DiDio on Wikipedia
- A recent ITIC survey finds that Microsoft is gaining major ground in virtualization vs. VMware and Windows Vista's bad rep is "undeserved"
- A 2004 piece where DiDio explains the why continued growth of the Firefox browser is unlikely
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