Its about adding value

Start with a little legend someone once told me: there's this guy who meets two friends of his in the pub. the first tells him: "Your wife sleeps around". The guy walks over and hugs him, tells him: "thanks for telling me". The other friend is stunned and goes: "You're so stupid!". The guy walks over and beats the hell out of him. Afterwards, people asked him: It doesn't make sense: you hug the first and beat up the other?. He said: "the first friend is a true friend: I learned something from him, even if it wasn't good news. I can do something about it. My other friend, he didn't tell me anything useful. He didn't add any value".


Back to reality: if you're reading this, you know that I'm new to this form of electronic interaction with the outside world. Recently, a good friend had posted a complementary article about the code scanning technology. He got two comments: one was suggesting that the technology was limited, the other one was basically suggesting that another company in the space is leading it.
My approach to this is that any interaction is a good one. It means people know about what's happening in code scanning. It means that more people care, and more people get exposure. It means that everyone in the space has higher chances at getting penetration.
I think I read somewhere (was it Guy Kawasaki's Blog?) that you should complement your competition in your public interaction, as it shows two things: a- you're confident and comfortable in openly discussing issues that relate to competition in the space and b- you are open to feedback, which will make your product a better fit to market needs.
So Chase, Tom, and whoever is out there, I invite you to have a useful discussion to add value and make a difference. If all you can say is that player "A" is leading the space, then I agree, they sure are leading the space in some dimension, I'm just not sure what it is :-)