Nice guys finish last

and assholes sleep with super models. I don't make the rules, I just comment on them. By now, you should be sufficiently confused, so let me tell you where I'm coming from.

Shimel just loves to stir it up (here). Says it's good for ratings. And he's quick to rush to the defense of vendor-land when the big bad analyst starts calling everyone names. He's referring to my rant yesterday about Dark Reading's 10 Reasons Security Products Don't Work (here). It seems that he mostly agrees with me, except my unfair and harsh characterizations of vendors. But Alan is off-base here because he fancies himself to be a good and ethical guy.

But this isn't Alan's first trip on the tuna boat, so unless he has temporary amnesia, he's forgetting about the calls we've had discussing those "lying" competitors. Those marketing-driven companies that have no technical chops, but make their products seem like the second coming. He's forgetting that in competitive markets, everything is fair game.

This is a problem the success of the security business has created. There are just too many damn companies. Pure and simple. They are all chasing the same customers with the same limited budgets. This is a zero-sum game. If you win a deal, the other guys lose.

So every vendor has to try really hard to differentiate and sometimes they take liberties with the truth to do so. It happens in the form of outrageous claims that seem to surface during the sales cycle. It's something as little as "we handle zero day attacks with no false positives." Of course that isn't the case, but that's what customers want to hear, so that's what the rep says.

Alan is right. Sooner or later the truth is going to hurt. But if your competition has told the customer they can do it, you have a choice. Do you tell them the competitor is wrong? Hmm. That's mudslinging and bad form, the customer thinks you are a schmuck. Do you say you can do it, but with lots of caveats to stick close to the truth? Well, that doesn't work either. The customer heard no caveats from the other guys. Your product must suck.

If you don't join the "fun," you will lose deals because the uneducated customer won't know the difference. By the time they figure it out, the other rep has cashed the check and made the payment on his damn 911. Sure he'll have to clean up a mess, but the ride will be nice to get there with 450 horses under the hood.

I had this problem big time when I was a marketing guy. We had a very aggressive competitor that wasn't constrained by the truth. They'd lie about what they could do, and make up stuff about what we couldn't. I tried to take the high road for a while, but it wasn't working. If the other guys were in the deal before us, we had to spend countless hours unwinding the web of lies. If we were in first, the other guys would show up and start the fabrication engine and we'd again be playing defense.

Just like in poker, you don't necessarily have to have the best cards to go on the offensive. Our best reps were always on the offensive. They would sit with the customer and say, "this is what you will hear from the other guys and this is why it's wrong." They would do pre-emptive strikes. It's a brilliant sales strategy, and when you have the truth on your side, you win more often than not. But reps that can stand in that kind of fire are few and far between. Maybe 15% of them. That's not enough to scale a business.

The sad truth is that the other 85% get scared and fold when faced with a very aggressive competitor. They stumble over their words, can't compete, and lose. Then they get fired. It's very sad.

The purists out there will say, "what goes around comes around." And in fact, in some cases is has. But as products mature, technical differentiation becomes less noticable. The vendors more successful during the early land grab phase will maintain market share because their product will get better. They figure out how to pacify those grumpy customers and they've successfully cut off the competitor's oxygen.

So what does this have to do with the managing expectations? It's that there is a HUGE incentive for vendors to grab market share in an early market. And that means a lot of folks will bend (or outright break) the truth to get the box in there. Since the typical lifespan of a start-up that gets positive exit is maybe 3-4 years, and a bulk of their boxes are sold in the last year - it's usually the acquirer that gets to clean up the mess.

Most importantly, what does this have to do with super models? By the time the users figure out it's Medusa lying next to them, the vendor has probably sold out to Cisco or Symantec for a crapload of money. They buy big boats, hang out with super models and then do it again. The virtuous cycle starts over.

For customers, the reality is unfortunate. We are going to continue to see this behavior because there is too much money at stake. And maybe there are some folks that do the right thing and in a few cases you can point to the nice guys finishing first. But that's the exception, not the rule.