No, I'm not talking about lazy Winter evenings on a rug... I'm talking about the responsibility of journalists to investigate, analyse, ask difficult questions, and cut through the hype and hyperbole.
So when a Senior Editor of eWeek sits down with a Microsoft SVP to discuss the recent deal with Novell, you would expect some thorough Q&A on this highly significant development. Instead, you get what reads like softball questions and slick pre-prepared answers.
Look at this example: when asked a general question about the deal, Muglia replies:
"...this is the answer to questions customers have had about the assurance that they are in compliance with intellectual property rules with Linux. [...] So this deal is a milestone in that it shows how commercial and open-source companies can work together to assure customers that when they acquire Novell SUSE's open-source technology they are in compliance with, and are respecting, all of the intellectual property that exists in the environment."
You get the usual marketing-speak that we've come to expect from Microsoft. Now there's some loaded statements in there, which just beg further scrutiny. But rather than dig deper, probe, analyse, scrutinise - we get another bland question. Remember, this is a "sit down" meeting (as declared in the leading paragraph), so Galli presumably had every opportunity to expand the discussion.
Some possible follow-up questions:
- How many of your customers are asking for assurance? What are they worried about?
- What are you referring to when you mention "intellectual property"? Surely you are just talking about Patents? If so, which patents are you claiming are infringing?
- Linux distributions are typically comprised of hundreds or even thousands of components, so what in particular are you referring to here? Are you focusing Samba and Mono (for example)? Are there other components implicated?
- What sort of analysis have you done on the Linux codebase to identify these potentially infringing code?
- You seem to be implying Linux is infringing on Microsoft patents. Which patents have you identified? What steps have you taken to resolve these potential infringements with the Linux developers?
- How do you see Linux as not respecting "intellectual property"?
- When you say "environment", are you referring to patents other than those in Microsoft's portfolio? Are you aware of other companies with possible patent claims?
- Is the timing of this announcement coincidental, just as the SCO case (where SCO accused IBM of "dumping" their "IP" into Linux) is on its last dying breath?
(And those are just the questions I have time to type up while reading that single paragraph on the train. I've got some great questions for Novell too...)
Unfortunately I see this style of article all over the trade press. There seems to be precious few journalists who see their it as duty to dig beyond the stock answers. Whatever happened to the followup? Instead, they seem to be perfectly content with getting canned responses to their answers and publishing something that seems more like a thinly velied press release than real news or investigation. The result is not much more than providing a marketing platform for the interviewer. You would expect more from a Senior Editor, would you not?
