Evaluator Group Gaffe

I am on a mailing list for The Evaluator Group.If you follow my work at all, or have talked to me on the topic, you know that I think most analysis is bogus, as are the firms that sell it. But Evaluator Group is generally pretty on the ball. They have good analysis, and seem to have their stuff together.So I found it massively amusing when their systems went awry early last week, and my blackberry began buzzing off my hip. I was busy in the lab with a vendor, so I glanced at it, and it appeared that they had incorrectly set up the email list they send their newsletter to. I laughed and went back to work. Others weren't so amused. You see, out of office auto-replies were going to the group, which generated out of office auto-replies... And of course, there were people angered by this who replied to the same address to demand that they be removed from the list, which generated responses from more out of office auto-replies.

This is possibly the analyst's absolute worst nightmare. You see, they told us in the middle of this storm "a third party list service provider did not perform as advertised". Heheh. Have a problem analysing their ability to perform?

When it finally settled down, I deleted more than 300 emails from my inbox caused by this problem and generated in a couple of hours. Most of them caused by people responding to the list.

I didn't request removal, after all we all make mistakes, and we're lucky if they aren't as glaring and public as the Evaluator Group. But I expect they'll be much more careful in the future. Someone on the list said it was "ESG" that caused the problem, and I said I was blogging. This scared ESG enough (another group of analysts that has earned my grudging respect) that they wrote to me to insure I didn't blog about them.

No worries Steve, like most of us, your mistakes haven't been this public :-), or if they were I wasn't watching.In general, I don't let these little blips bother me. It's annoying to get that much email that is essentially spam in that short a time, but honestly, if you're paying the Evaluator Group for their services, isn't the important part the quality of their advice, and whether they're taking cash from vendors while taking cash from you? You can delete email without expense, but if you act on bad advice you'll be paying for years.

So those of you on that list who got really pissy with the Evaluator group... Get over it. Unless you're perfect. Somehow, I doubt you are.