The truth behind the numbers

The blog of Paul Murphy should be compulsory reading for every sales rep at sun to withstand all of this FUD surrounding the future. Another good article about the user survey made by the Gabriel Consulting Group
It´s a classical example of “Numbers don´t lie as long as you know the way the were calculated” and something i call “spin doctoring by statistic engineering”: When the outcome of an survey don´t match your expectations, you develop a method that leads to the results you want. Read the blog entry from Paul to unterstand the method behind the this case of spin doctoring:

In other words, this is actually a very cool piece of work - but readers should understand that the larger the margin this report awards IBM on any one question, the greater the margin by which Sun actually won it.