Email Battles ?

Today I felt the need to pay some attention to a development I am not completely sure about how to deal with …

About 2 weeks ago the website Emailbattles.com published an article which featured one of my posts about Exchange. The article centered around a post by Richard Schwartz on marketshares.

Today I noticed yet another post : Data from heaven: Exchange & Domino debate scalability.

“Sales gurus Ed Brill (Lotus) and Peter de Haas (Microsoft) are duking it out over scalability of the Domino vs Exchange. Each is trotting out his best studies to support his claims. And each ably demonstrates why the others’ research is garbage.”


What I am not sure about is how I should deal with making comments on other peoples blogs which at any moment can be taken out of context and make people read more into this than I intended. This is the case in my opinion in some of emailbattles’ posts. Posts and comments are turned into an IBM vs Microsoft “battle” whereas I see it, it is a discussion between a whole bunch of bloggers some of which happen to work for a software company.
(I am not saying emailbattles does the wrong thing and what I also read into their posts is that they welcome this kind of discussion (or this is my wishful thinking :-))

Sure I work for Microsoft, but like the disclaimer on my weblog states I blog and comment as a private person who happens to work for Microsoft. From that perspective I give my (very) biased opinion and try to put forward information to the best of my abilities. I do not communicate on behalf of Microsoft, for the simple reason I am not an official spokesperson, nor am I necessarily a specialist in certain area’s.

The reason I comment on other peoples blogs is the fact that I want to provide (additional) context to the story / show the other side of the story by sharing information and insight that is publicly available but not necessarily know to the broader / specific audience and yes I do this with a Microsoft biased perspective, because this is what I know.

I am just wondering how other bloggers deal with this. At the end of the day it is undoable to chase posts and give comments to exch and everyone of them …