Last month I wrote about a USA Today story on Infor. Instead of focusing on Infor’s micro-vertical and other investments, Jon Swartz chose to focus on beanbags at HQ and the gossipy aspect of Charles Phillips versus former boss, Larry Ellison.
This week Quentin Hardy at the NY Times raises it several decibels. He puts NetSuite and Workday squarely in the middle. They deserve to be. In fact they deserve multi-part articles each. Instead, Quentin again focuses on the Larry angle – as investor in NetSuite, as “incentive” for Dave and Aneel at Workday.
While Larry is great for tech writer gossip, the reality is thousands of buyer decisions are made with him as a small decision driver. When Oracle is involved, Mark Hurd and Thomas Kurian and Steve Miranda are much more influential in their decision. Their decisions are also more reflective of NetSuite’s growing retail vertical prowess or its attractiveness as a “tier 2” option for global companies. And they reflect Dave’s HR pedigree, and a number of architectural decisions Workday has made for its cloud solutions.
Probably not convenient for his angle, but a story which ends with a quote about “who owns the future” of the enterprise software industry with no mention at all of Salesforce.com or Infor or Microsoft is a bit tough to swallow.
Jon and Quentin are no spring chickens when it comes to tech coverage. I wish they would give enterprise tech far more intense and regular coverage (like multiple stories on each of the vendors, their customers, their products) not just focus on the gossipy angles which have little to do with the commerce of enterprise software.
