To be honest we thought long and hard about going public with this, as it all happened quite some time ago now.
We've built our company on being open, up front and honest with people. I was sick of working for companies that would be economical with the truth in front of clients, and say whatever needed to be said in order to win some additional work. I think that being honest really is the best way of building long-term relationships with people. Eventually they respect you for it ;)
We know that this goes on all the time, and up to a point we just suck it down as it's part of the industry that we work in. We absorb the cost, so in the end people do pay for this sort of work, just not directly.
The reason we decided to write about this was due to the audacity of what had happened. Our ideas were pretty unique, we felt, and so it was clear to see what had gone on when the site eventually went live.
At the end of the day, if we lose business because of this, then it's probably the sort of business we would have no interest working on in the first place.
If the key element that you're upset about was telephone guided co-browsing, I call "not unique".
You may very well have been the ones to introduce the idea/term to Faberge, but if you were the first ones to pitch AJAX or Flash to them, should they be barred from using that in their eventual solution, too?
AJAX and Flash is a generic technology, telephone guided co-browsing is a specific implementation, most likely using that technology. There's a big difference there, especially when Flash and AJAX are ubiquitous on the web and the phone guided browsing is more innovative.
To be honest we thought long and hard about going public with this, as it all happened quite some time ago now.
We've built our company on being open, up front and honest with people. I was sick of working for companies that would be economical with the truth in front of clients, and say whatever needed to be said in order to win some additional work. I think that being honest really is the best way of building long-term relationships with people. Eventually they respect you for it ;)
We know that this goes on all the time, and up to a point we just suck it down as it's part of the industry that we work in. We absorb the cost, so in the end people do pay for this sort of work, just not directly.
The reason we decided to write about this was due to the audacity of what had happened. Our ideas were pretty unique, we felt, and so it was clear to see what had gone on when the site eventually went live.
At the end of the day, if we lose business because of this, then it's probably the sort of business we would have no interest working on in the first place.