Journalists: the new industry analyst watchdogs?

RedMonk analyst James Governor points to an interesting read on the issue of analyst independence posted on a BusinessWeek blog:

BusinessWeek's new blog has gone after Laura DiDio, Yankee's Get The Facts lead. Laura has long been a target of Linux lovers, for her uncompromising defence of the proprietary. But BusinessWeek writer Steve Hamm aims to expose limitations in Yankee's research approach. It will be interesting to see if a story appears in the print edition; it has to be likely. If you want to contact me for the article Steve i would be more than happy to contribute. I tend to pretty vocal on the subject of industry analyst ethics, and RedMonk is doing the best we can to do the right thing.

Yankee recently published controversial survey results showing that running Linux is about the same cost as running Windows. The researcher's methodology quickly drew fire while others pointed out that Yankee changed its tack on the issue from last year, when it published a report saying that Windows is cheaper than Linux.

At any rate, this is a tough lesson in transparency that traditionally targets journalists. But as Yankee Group found out the hard way, there is nothing stopping inquisitive individuals like Steve Hamm from calling out dubious research findings and then telling the world about it.