A couple of weeks back, Sun’s Tim Bray wrote an interesting little piece reacting to (yet) another lambasting of Wikipedia by an otherwise intelligent Andrew Orlowski. The part that interested me, however, wasn’t his defense of Wikipedia: I’m frankly more or less totally unconcerned what would-be critics of Wikipedia think of it, or the doom they perceive within its success. Why? For me, it just works, but more importantly, a substantial majority of my non-technical friends and family are avid users of Wikipedia. I can’t imagine one of them being persuaded by Orlowski’s arguments, and I’m not therefore particularly concerned about the future of the online encyclopedia; demand, in my opinion, is the surest safeguard to its future.
No, what I found most compelling within Bray’s defense was his tidbit on length. Here’s the quote:
Anyhow, in among all this tilting at windmills there is a (fairly well concealed) thing to think about, and it has to do with length. It doesnât bother me that much of the prose I read these days has an age measured in hours, or is evanescent electronic text, or is produced by principals rather than intermediaries. But hereâs what Iâm coming to think: in text, short form tends to drive out long form. Our novelty-seeking chimpanzee minds would rather chew through a bunch of tasty little morsels than a full balanced meal. For example, when I was just about to turn in last night, I glanced at the New Yorker magazine at the end of the sofa, got started reading George Packerâs excellent The Lesson of Tal Afar, and didnât get to bed till way past 1AM. And I learned some things about the state of play in Iraq that no succession of blog posts is gonna teach me, because the material really needs a dozen or so pages of beautifully-typeset densely-argued discourse.
This resonated with me mostly because we at RedMonk have had debates – often heated ones – on just this topic. They centered primarily around what the value of analyst reports are in today’s attention and time starved world. We, as is obvious to those who’ve been following us for a while, have mostly departed the realm of writing long, formal, multi-page reports in favor of shorter (relatively speaking), more timely analysis. We’ll still write papers on occasion – non-commisioned, of course (except for those that we ghost write) – but the vast majority of our analysis is output to our individual blogs.
That this transition coincided with a moderate but statistically significant uptick in our overall business (and at least perceived authority) is interesting, and certainly relevant, but what I’m really wondering is whether or not that’s a good thing. I believe Bray is right, and that the short form does indeed drive out the long form in many if not most cases, and that in turn is likely have profound consequences for any number of publishing businesses – ours included. Whether that’s a positive development or not is an open question.
While I personally am reluctant to invest the half hour or so required to digest papers in the 8+ page range, I’m fully aware of the fact that some subjects simply demand that sort of attention. Our COA notion, for example, is not something that I believe could be adequately delivered in the context of a blog. It’s a bit complex, and a bit nuanced, and therefore isn’t the best fit for a medium where you’re competing for attention with hundreds or maybe thousands of other simpler, easier to digest items.
I’m very much an advocate of fitting the content to the medium and the audience, and I’m curious as to what all of you think on the subject, and what the implications might be. I’ve been very skeptical of the value of analyst written white papers for some time – and not just the commissioned ones. I’ve pushed RedMonk, in fact, to become far less paper-centric because I don’t believe that to be a long term, compelling business proposition for anyone but the top 2 or 3 firms. It also is far less than suitable for our target audience of developers and architects. From my experience, vendors seem to be conflicted as well; a couple of the ghost writing projects that we’ve had in recent months have seen customers admit candidly that they didn’t expect the majority of readers to actually process anything but the conclusion and – possibly – content that’s neatly bulleted. Where that would seem to me to call into question the overall value of the white paper as an exercise and marketing tool, there remains a compulsion on the part of many vendors to churn these out. Many Analyst Relations professionals, for example, are compensated based on the number of papers they can extract out of their analysts. Is that the best way of building awareness and visibility these days, or might we see more campaigns like this one? Is it a lack of creativity on their part, or do these remain high value as marketing tools?
Without question, I have a slightly skewed perspective on this because I spend most of my time in the weeds with developers, who a.) rarely read them and b.) seldom the target audience of these things. I have problems with that approach, of course, because if you’re targeting the “IT decision maker” these days I think it’s silly not to be targeting the developer, but that’s a whole other story.
In any event, I’m very interested in hearing what some of you think of the value of analyst whitepapers and reports. Are they valuable to your efforts? Should we be doing more of them? And if their value is lessened, do you think that’s a good or a bad thing?
