Revisionist curmudgeons

wow, the mighty Jeff Jarvis takes aim at me today, and for double points I get lumped into the same post where he unleashes his tirade on Nick Carr. I just don't have the time to respond to Jarvis' critique or the comments that follow the post, but I will say that I've been writing about web 2.x, blogs, transparency, blah blah blah for years, so it's a little disingenuous for anyone to suggest that I'm all for being closed when I have a written record to back me up.

The last point I wish to make is that Jarvis deliberately mistates my post to suggest I'm all for being dishonest. What I actually wrote is:

Yesterday I wrote that good companies essentially know what they want to design/build and they should ignore their customers. While provocative, that isn't exactly what I meant, I believe the best strategy is to know what you want to build based on a data driven model for product management combined with a qualified intuition

and furthermore I wrote earlier in the post that:
Of course companies should be honest, but that's a corporate value and not a strategy. I wouldn't want to work for a company that didn't value honesty, I wouldn't invest in one, and fundamentally I believe that companies that don't value honesty do not perform well either.

I really don't think I'm the one being curmudgeonly here.

Link: BuzzMachine � Blog Archive � Revisionist curmudgeons.

In his next post, he argues against the notion that companies should be transparent. Yes, we all love to give our money to people who hide, lie, cheat, and steal. This is curmudgeonlliness for the sake of curmudgeonliness.