Software
I'm appalled to find, in the latest issue of Communications of the ACM (CACM), two vendor puff pieces - one from the from the "Master Architect for Sun Professional Services", the other from the "CTO for Microsoft's U.S. Central Region" - professing to compare the merits of J2EE and .NET. The actual technical content in each piece could be reduced to a couple of paragraphs. The rest is marketing dribble that seeks to cast aspersions on the other product. CACM bills this as a "lively debate". I think it should spark a debate as to CACM's credibility and relevance.

We do need in-depth, unbiased, highly technical comparisons of J2EE and .NET by independent sources with no axes to grind. Hiring shills from the vendors of these products is not the way to go about this.

By way of contrast, the June 1993 edition of CACM - a special issue devoted to the next generation of Graphical User Interfaces - does not contain any pieces from Microsoft about the next generation of Windows or from Apple about its future GUI plans. I'm now wondering when exactly in the ten year span between these issues did CACM lose its integrity?