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How to contradict yourself in two easy steps

How to contradict yourself in two easy steps:

Step 1. Dare Obasajno (a PM at Microsoft) argues that anyone comparing Adobe's Apollo and Microsoft's Silverlight by mentioning them in "the same sentence as if they are similar products" is proof that ["popular technology blog pundits"] don't "do much research and in many cases aren't technical enough to do the research anyway."

Step 2. In the same post, Dare (remember- a PM at Microsoft) provides his own comparison of Adobe's Apollo and Microsoft's Silverlight by mentioning them in the same sentence as if they were similar products, arguably validating comparisons by the aforementioned, apparently unresearched, popular technology blog pundits that in his view are not technical enough to do the research anyway:

"Apollo is Adobe's Flash based knock off competitor to the .NET Framework while Silverlight is Microsoft's .NET Framework based knock off competitor to the Flash platform."

In this response to Dare's nonsense post, Harry Pierson (an architect at Microsoft) deftly avoids being labelled as an unresearched-popular-technology-blog-pundit-that-isn't-technical-enough-to-do-the-research-anyway by not comparing the products in the same sentence, but by instead comparing the companies Adobe and Microsoft:

"The upshot is that both companies are trying to deliver a unified "client" platform that spans desktop, devices and browser. That sounds like "platform competition" to me."

Comments

Ikezi Kamanu said:

Though they're being used in the same sentence, I see no comparison between Apollo and Silverlight; he's not referring to them as similar products.  

In that sentence, he's comparing Apollo to .NET, and Silverlight to Flash, which is indeed a more fitting comparison (than Apollo to Silverlight).

-ekz

# May 24, 2007 6:31 AM

Bryan Zug said:

much as I find DO's rhetoric over the top at times, he's contrasting in that sentence, not comparing -- so it seems like his reasoning holds up to me.

# May 24, 2007 12:42 PM

Katy G. B. said:

recursive logic is be default false... even if its also confusing.  the two above replies demonstrate both points... and sadly the show why ms products, fud, &bs are all like even still being believed.  its just like seriously, OMG!

# May 24, 2007 5:41 PM