I agree with absolutely everything you’ve said. I think the main point here though is that this list/survey/competition really is nothing to do with the product. It’s all about the vendors, and their perception of themselves. I trust the answers they volunteer not at all. In fact, I’d say the lower the better!

Maybe this kind of thing is more meaningful for a Plone/Drupal/Joomla!/Umbraco kind of ecosystem?
http://jonontech.com/2009/05/12/cms-celebrity-deathmatch-the-developers-speak/

Jon

http://francescociriaci.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/we-get-it-checklist-for-vendors-plone/#comment-63

A tangent about comparing enterprise vendors to commercial community support: In enterprise search, I had to suffer sales presentations at a former employer from FAST where they constantly maligned our primary choice of Solr as not having a single throat to choke — they never purchased FAST and started slowly adopting usage of Solr with self-support. Now that Solr has a more robust primary-vendor sales channel (via Lucid Imagination), it might make Solr more attractive to the same companies that need hand-holding, high-transaction-cost sales process, but only for companies that have broken tech acquisition process (I would much rather see enterprise F/OSS vendors like this succeed for the quality of their customers, not the lack thereof). You should judge vendors (or channels of vendors) on the availability of commercial support and pre-sale consulting options, not the availability of sales staff with a product-agenda that trumps the agenda of the customer.

Disclaimer: I dabble as an occasional Plone consultant, and have made money from employment at user companies related to Plone/Zope for the past 10 years.

Sean

@James H: you’re right of course. Commercial imperative demands products that tick boxes and demo well. But just try living with such a thing! Poacher or gamekeeper….

Imagine the poor customer listening to the 6th presentation in a row, all claiming to be the holy effing grail of CMS. And than it is your turn, and you admit there are some bugs and funny GUIs. I have won many tenders with this strategy. You can not imagine those eyes wide open when I said we have bugs.

The other is open source. What I tell customers is to go and download it, find out for yourself. If the IT guys are not that busy, they can even check ut the source, at least the API parts.

I always wonder how people dare to decide on a CMS based on a written proposal, still many companies do.

Lest we forget – most vendors are extremely experienced in filling in tender and RFI documents that get assessed for their merit – including evading the question in the first place and answering the one you would prefer – to coin the phrase ‘the devil is in the detail’ would put it mildly – and reading the responses to a number of vendors definately put a competitive smile on my face……..

Here was our CMS meme: Vendor Meme – Enano CMS