Can we call of this advertising before it gets out of hand? (Was: Re: Report Writer)

<Advertisement from company 1 deleted>

<Legitimate 3rd party post text retained, but I deleted the reference to  the first product anyway>
>>But, since the net isn't for advertisements, you might not want to do
>>that. There are plenty of good products out there, <deleted> is just one.
>>DataPrism/DataPivot (Brio Software) and Personal Access (Spinnaker)
>>are a couple others that I know of.

<Counter advertisement from company 2 deleted>

Ignoring the ethical considerations of posting advertising to USENET for a moment, can we try to look at this logically?

I'm sure both of you know how many products there are out there to do this job. And I'm sure you both realise that almost all of them have people who read these newsgroups. The first poster has now done this twice in about two weeks. If we all start advertising our database access tools here, at that same rate, it will clutter up and become useless both to us and to the rest of the people using the newsgroups.

As I indicated to the first poster, if one company starts this, it becomes very difficult for others to hold back due to the perception that one company is gaining advantage out of the situation.

Getting into an advertising war will only harm the database access industry's image. It's one thing to try to increase your share of the proverbial pie, but this sort of thing will only succeed in reducing the size of the pie.

As for the rest of the companies who are still taking the ethical approach and holding back, please continut to do so. I'm sure none of you want to get into a network advertising war any more than I do.

I encourage anybody looking for report writing software to look at all available products and evaluate them side by side.

In order to back this up, I will make available a list of all database access products known to me (except for products bundled with databases) and make it available for automatic retrieval by mail. I encourage vendors to check this list when it is available to ensure that there have been no omissions or errors.

The list should be available later today from:

        dbaccess_at_cbme.unsw.EDU.AU

-- 
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troy_at_cbme.unsw.EDU.AU	      Overworked, overcommited and always multitasking.
Opinions expressed are not those of the CBME or UNSW, but are my opinions only.