Radicati-Bashing Is So Yesterday! Now It's Meta's Turn

OK, I think by now everyone knows about the ruckus over Radicati over in Ed Brill's blog.

(In case you don't know about it, It started with Michael Sampson's dissection of the Radicati Group's flawed report titled "IBM Lotus & Microsoft - Corporate Messaging Market Analysis, which is available for free download from the Microsoft web site. Ed's post referring to Michael's analysis apparently drew an email response from someone at Radicati, and then when Ed connected the IP address in the email headers to the IP address of certain pseudonymous responses to his previous blog posts, a monster thread with 73 (so far) responses questioning the ethics of at least one Radicati researcher).

Anyhow, Michael Sampson is at it again. This time, it's a Meta Group report called "Messaging Total Cost of Ownership: Microsoft Exchange 2003 and Lotus Domino in Small and Medium Organizations", which is also a free download from the Microsoft site, that Michael finds to be flawed. Michael's full analysis points out many flaws in the report, not the least of which is the fact that it compares Exchange 2003 running on Windows 2003 to a hodge-podge or Notes and Domino versions running on various platforms. One thing that Michael didn't point out, which I think might also be a contributory factor, is the small sample size of just 9 data points, selected from a total study of 12 customer environments. Funny that the report doesn't mention what factors caused the exclusion of three of the 12 environments from the study. I wonder... could it be that they made Notes and Domino look too good? No.... I'd never dream of accusing a respected industry analysis firm like Meta of doing such a thing. I'm not the suspicious sort. Really. ;-) I would like to know, however, why such a small sample size was used, and why some of the studied environments were excluded.