Saturday, February 03, 2007

"I said that?"... Being mis-quoted.

Just returned from our Business Intelligence Summit in London, the biggest and the best ever, according to the attendees. And while I felt exhausted and brain-drained every evening, I believe I still can largely remember what I said during the countless meetings with clients, vendors, and members of the press. That's why I was kinda surprised when I received the press clippings with quotes that I would have never, ever said, not in this context or any other. For example, ZDnet UK titles its article:
Gartner: It's business intelligence 2.0 time
Uh. Not quite, in fact, the opposite is probably closer to what we said. I remember a few cases of vendors getting criticized for trying to add the popular 2.0 moniker to their marketing, although they wouldn't even provide 1.0 functionality. The article starts with
Forget talk of Web 2.0, it's time for BI 2.0, according to Gartner.
Nope. Not sure where that quote would come from.
Speaking at the Gartner BI Summit [...], Andreas Bitterer, said the next generation of business intelligence (BI) would be defined by what it was not.
I don't even know what that means, and I would never say any such thing unless I'm completely drunk, which I clearly wasn't back there on stage.
To begin with, BI 2.0 is not about more suppliers, said Bitterer. "There are too many BI vendors," he explained.
Oh, my. I said nothing about BI 2.0 (in fact, I think it's nonsense), and I also didn't say that there were too many BI vendors. What I said is that organizations run BI software from too many different vendors. Slight difference.
"You cannot get one vendor's software to work with another's," he said. "They do not make it easy.
Wrong again. What I explained is the difficulty to migrate reports from one vendor to another, and the vendors do not make it easy by not providing any export functionality and prohibiting reverse engineering.

Oh well, it wasn't the first time that I'm misquoted nor was it the last time. It's just strange to see, how direct quotes get spun around, causing quite a bit of confusion and potential inconsistency.