Poll Results Misleading
A couple of weeks ago, I
blogged about a survey on virtualization.info that shockingly showed more folks using Microsoft's Hyper-V than VMware's ESX.
The thrust of my comments was that we needed a lot more information about the survey to be able to determine the legitimacy of the results. Well, Alessandro Pirilli, the owner/operator of the Website, has provided that information. What he revealed tells me that his results aren't to be trusted.
There was no filtering of survey results, and anonymity was granted. Alessandro says himself that anyone could vote as often as they wanted, including vendors. Really, you don't have to go any further than that to throw out the findings.
Alessandro, to his great credit, also says that people from the Microsoft and VMware domains both voted heavily in the survey -- but much more heavily for Microsoft than VMware. He gives the exact totals, too.
Despite the fact that Microsoft cheated a lot more, both companies tried to stack the deck -- and for that, both vendors should be ashamed. Thanks, guys -- instead of a survey that could have given us valuable insight, your transparent attempts at ballot-box stuffing invalidated the results.
Naturally, the validity of the responses to the other poll questions has been destroyed as well. It's a shame, because it's obvious that Alessandro put a lot of work into this effort. I'm sure he learned a hard lesson from this on how to properly do a survey. I also hope that the cheaters at Microsoft and VMware learned a lesson -- but I'm much less confident about that even than the survey findings.
Posted by Keith Ward on 02/03/2009 at 12:48 PM