Where are the elephant hunters?

October 8 - Gartner kicks off Symposium and in one Magic Quadrant after another, IBM shows up in top right quadrant. Managed Storage. Enterprise Application Servers. Even Offshore application services. Companies which did not do so well in years past now acquired by IBM get the top right billing.

October 9 - I hear the Analyst Relations lady at Oracle brags she punishes industry analysts who don't toe the line. I guess punishment means lack of access to executives and lowered fees.   

October 10 - at Office 2.0 I hear how growth of web productivity tools is hindered by unreliable network availability in most places.  But I hear no one blame the telcos for letting the US telecom industry slip in global broadband and wireless leadership.

October 10 - Back at Gartner Symposium, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft entertains the crowd with his French and his analogy of Microsoft as a "dog with a bone". He repeats the need to do "fast twitch" projects - words he used at last year's conference. But as this article says, the analysts did not really press him on what had changed in the last 12 months as Vista and other products continue to slip.

October 11 - the Department of Justice approves the AT&T-BellSouth merger without a peep. Earthlink protests in a press release, but not many appear to be listening  "Today, the Justice Department abandoned consumers and small businesses by refusing to require even those modest protections on the proposed AT&T- BellSouth merger, the largest telecommunications merger in American history."

October 12 - Nick Carr suggests the same Justice department go after Google, not even one tenth the size of AT&T. Curious, I search his blog archives. He has hardly any posts criticizing IBM, HP, Verizon and the large tech/telecom vendors in the last year. In contrast he targets Wikipedia almost once a month.  I guess some IT matters more to him than others.

What's my point? Our industry has been lobbied, bullied, pretexted by the bigger vendors. If you think the products and services of these vendors are innovative, by all means support them. If you think the top 10 global tech/telco vendors deserve to make $ 500 billion a year while Office 2.0, VoIP, open source and other start up vendors scratch for $ 10,000 budgets, keep your peace.

If not, speak up with your blogs, your budgets, letters to Congress - because few industry gurus and watchers appear to be doing that for you.