Dereliction of Duty

Recently started looking into Metadata Registries and UDEF and related semantic technology.

The Wikipedia page lists a bunch of relevant Metadata Registry projects and commercial products. Very nice. Easy to follow the links and determine features and benefits.

However.

A client has IBM Cognos. Is there any easy to to see what kind of Metadata features are part of Cognos?

No. Not really.

I wondered about this marketing gap. Why doesn't IBM (or Oracle, they're pretty bad at this also) provide a tidy list of features?

• They're so big (and arrogant) that they don't feel the need to do any marketing?
• They're so paranoid that they don't want to have their products reduce to a simple bullet list?
• They're sales people are so good that they don't need a web presence to sell their products?
• They already have such tight wired-in relationships that they don't need to do any marketing?

Or is it the "growth by acquisition" problem? Since IBM acquired Cognos, they hesitate to commit to a list of features?

Whatever the reason, it's frankly difficult to include IBM products in an easy-to-understand info-graphic comparing alternative products.

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