SO many leaders …

February 2, 2009 by Dave Haynes

I have some bemused fascination with press releases. probably because as a newspaper reporter and assigning editor I had to, for many years, sift through stacks of them looking for real information and filtering out ALL the blabber.

In an odd way I find myself doing the same thing with this blog, though I have abandoned any notion of trying to make this a news portal. THAT would take way to much time, and there are others trying to fill that role.

Still, I read much of what gets gushed out by the day and have enjoyed noticing in the opening or tag lines of press releases how many companies are the leaders in this industry, and how few are followers.

So for a couple of hours last night I sifted through the websites of about 30 of the larger software companies to see how they position themselves. Turns out, we have a lot of world and global leaders – eight, by my count. Scala, separately, calls itself the world’s largest provider, which may actually be true based on packages sold.

We also have a world-class provider. Several industry leaders. A recognized leader. A respected company. A pioneer. An ultimate provider. And “the professional supplier” – which of course means the rest of you are amateurs … so there.

This of course prompts the question of how so many companies can be the leaders, but to the credit of most of the marketing people they have carefully positioned their companies as only being among the leaders.

I was also surprised how many companies just stayed the hell away from all this. Gerba’s Wirespring company just says it has software that “helps” companies.

Then there’s UCView, an LA-area company with a nice little platform I saw a couple of years back at InfoComm. They nicely stay neutral on the whole industry leading thing in their PR, but then on the gateway page to their website, you get this: “Why is everybody choosing UCView?”

Well, if that’s true, then UCView is the recognized, global, worldwide leading supplier. And that’s that.