Carl Tyler's Blog :: Here's a good question someone asked me on IM today...

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"Don't you worry that your comments on your blog will piss IBM off and you won't get to speak at Lotusphere?"

My sincere honest answer and one I believe is no, not at all. I don't believe individuals at IBM are that petty and immature, I don't believe they make speaker judgements based upon whether someone sees everything they do as positive, if that was the case, then workarounds to known IBM Lotus issues wouldn't be allowed at Lotusphere. I believe they pick speakers based on their merits, so if I get chosen to speak great, if I don't then I don't believe it's because of what might have been written about on this blog.

I tend to write about things as I see them, I tend not to spin it in marketing blurb, but write it pretty honestly with poor grammar. So don't expect me to write any differently just because I've submitted a couple of Lotusphere session abstracts.

Now if I worked for IBM and I had a public blog, or was dealing with the press, things would be different and I'd tow the party line, but even then in those 1 to 1 customer meetings I'd still tell them what I really thought, as customer relationships are all built on trust, lose that trust and you lose the customer.

Comments

1 - Several years ago, a well known blogger may a loud pronouncement that there was no way I'd ever speak at Lotusphere given the way I rag on IBM on my blog and in the Partner Forum (I used to be worse, because they were behaving badly toward Notes). This blogger in fact, made such a statement (and a dinner bet, if I'm not mistaken) to someone who ended up in charge of picking the speakers. I'm not suggesting that bet had anything to do with me speaking that first time, but one can never know.

Posted by Andrew Pollack At 09:04:09 PM On 09/18/2007 | - Website - |

2 - It would be naive to think that one's public persona had no influence on whether or not they were selected / recruited to speak at industry events. Credibility can offset approach, the opposite is not necessarily true.

Andrew -- I did indeed have a concern about having you speak when you were spending a lot of time ragging on the J2EE-related efforts. Some of what you said at the time was founded, and some wasn't. And some of it impacted what IBMers thought, and some of it didn't. Ultimately, I'm just one cog in the wheel, and sometimes, like in any decision-making, I pick my battles. Your credibility trumped your outspokenness back then -- that doesn't mean that this is always true for everyone.

(Note -- this is not a statement about Carl or anyone in particular)