[Zope] Tesh sues Vignette (fwd)

[Jean Jordaan]

Go Zope?

-----Original Message-----
From: Justin Mason [mailto:jm@mail.netnoteinc.com]
Sent: 27 September 2000 02:07
To: tbtf-irregulars@world.std.com
Subject: [IRR] [cms-list] Tesh sues Vignette (fwd)

------- Forwarded Message

Date:    Wed, 27 Sep 2000 11:17:37 +1100
From:    David Walker <DavidW@echoice.com.au>
To:      cms-list@camworld.com
Subject: [cms-list] Tesh sues Vignette

Interesting Vignette story: John Tesh (yes, the bloke who used to front
Entertainment Tonight - his production company is doing a Web site) has sued
Vignette for promising and not delivering.

Tesh's suit reportedly claims Vignette and/or its agent claimed (in late
1999) that StoryServer provided:
* the ability to automatically syndicate content
* workflow support
* the ability to develop a Web site in 1-2 months
* support for "all standard scripting languages".
Then Vignette trainers allegedly told Tesh's people that these services were
not provided. 

The story is at
http://www.inside.com/story/Story_Cached/0,2770,9901_13_32_1,00.html 

Inside.com has in fact done some very interesting reporting on Vignette. It
was Inside that reported major media sites such as the Chicago Tribune were
having second thoughts about the technology. (That story was written by
ex-Tribune online journalist Jimmy Guterman.)

Inside.com speaks from a position of experience: from their URLs, they're
running StoryServer themselves.Presumably they have good reasons for making
the call that stories of Vignette's dubious functionality have some basis in
truth.

I am aware of at least one other firm which has felt there was a mismatch
between Vignette's marketing claims and the product's reality.

This mismatch certainly existed in Vignette's early days. See the article by
database-backed Web site guru Philip Greenspun:

http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/vignette-old

This article contains the following glorious paragraph about the 1997-era
StoryServer:

"Vignette's StoryServer product does not do any of the things that their
marketing literature claims it does. It is not a content management system.
It is not a version control system. It is not a personalization system. The
only sense in which it might be any of these things is that a programmer
could use it to build one of these things. However, you could say the same
thing about the raw Unix operating system plus a C compiler. Sitting through
a meeting with them was for me a rather surreal experience. It would be
rather akin to hearing Adobe pitch PhotoShop as a payroll check processing
system."

Please note that Vignette's software does a lot more than it did in 1997,
and appears to do more now than it did in late 1999. The company certainly
seems capable of product improvement over time.

Has anyone else come across instances of Vignette exaggerating their
product's abilities? 

Regards,
David Walker

eChoice: http://www.echoice.com.au, mailto:davidw@echoice.com.au 
Journalism/analysis: http://www.shorewalker.com,
mailto:david@shorewalker.com 


 

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