There is no bigger waste of time than listening to a vendor herald the nonexistent virtues of a nonexistent product in an impossibly obtuse language called marketese. Read these tips?courtesy of two whistle-blowing PR reps (we’ll call them John and Jane)?so that you don’t squander another second of your valuable time.

First off, don’t believe what you hear or read (unless it’s in CIO).

In high tech, everyone’s on the take. At least that’s the sense you get talking to John and Jane. There’s so much back-scratching between allegedly objective information sources and vendors that not much of anything is worth investing time in.

"When we give analyst references, all those folks are pretty much on the dole these days," John says. Analysts have become aggressive about not providing vendors with reviews or insight unless there’s a payoff involved. (See "How to Analyze the Analysts," July 15, 2001.)

To prove it, John shows off an e-mail from one analyst company, call it MegaAnalyze. His client company (call it Company X) asked for a briefing with MegaAnalyze. MegaAnalyze replied by asking, "Is Company X willing and able to commit at least $[X]/year for an ongoing relationship?" In other words, no cash, no chitchat.

White papers are often as bogus as the analyst opinions. Even if a white paper has "independent" authors, it could have been written?or heavily influenced?by the vendor’s marketing department. Tech journalists, in fact, are often offered large sums of money to ghost write white papers for vendors.

Don’t even believe other users.

Well, at least there are user references, right?

Wrong. User references, which many CIOs rely on when evaluating vendor claims, can be equally dubious. Vendors have so much difficulty recruiting users for that purpose that they will offer kickbacks to users who play ball?free consulting on a project, for example, or a knock off on price.

And secondhand references are completely worthless. "Sometimes you hear these stories from vendors, ’We have this one customer who’s getting all these benefits out of the product, but we can’t tell you who they are.’ Beware of that," Jane says. "Demand to speak to customers. If the vendor won’t provide them, then that’s a pretty good tip-off that the product doesn’t work yet."

Read Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore.

Not because it’s good but because it’s the high-tech marketers’ playbook.

A sample, from page 132: "How far must one go to serve one’s customers? Well, in the case of crossing the chasm, one of the key things a pragmatist customer wants to see is strong competition. If you are fresh from developing a new value proposition...that competition is not likely to exist?at least not in a form that a pragmatist would appreciate. What you have to do then is create it." Create enough hype, Moore advises, and the hype becomes the reality.