« Yee Haa | Main | New European President »
May 14, 2003
IT Shootouts
I just love these weird techo phrases. They come into existence, get over-hyped and over-used, and then vanish into the ether. The meeting I attended this morning was using the phrase "shootout" which refers to the process of comparing two vendors and their products by holding some form of competition. This is used when the choice of products is not clear and, when implemented correctly, allows the customer to test the products in their deployment environment.
Unfortunately it can be rigged to make one product or vendor look better than another. This in turn allows the introduction of products that would not otherwise meet normal requirements by showing them to be better than an existing product that has been approved. In some cases, the rigging is clear and blatent, in other cases it is much harder to tell.
The whole thing reminds me of my Uncle Joe who was a real shootout champion, fastest gun is the west, his gun used to fire before it left the holster. He was known far and wide as "two-toe-joe".
Posted by Ozguru at May 14, 2003 06:05 PM
