Open letter to David Allen Company and NetCentrics

An Open Letter to NetCentrics and the David Allen Company

Earlier today, someone, or several people, from NetCentrics (or working through their network) began "stuffing the ballot box" of the DA GTD Outlook Add-In poll on my website. Despite some rudimentary controls to prevent this multiple voting, skewing the results is not difficult for someone who knows a little about how these things work. Obviously, tampered-with results are of little use to the rest of us. Consequently, I have removed the poll from my site.


Apparently I offended or annoyed Netcentrics by including this poll on my site. This certainly was not my intention, and I genuinely apologize if I did so.


In my business, we try to collect all the feedback, both positive and negative, that we can from customers, competitors and the entire marketplace. We use all the information that we gather to establish benchmarks from which we can improve. We find it both complimentary and beneficial when third parties help us and our customers evaluate our product and service offerings. I'm sorry that the poll on my site wasn't useful in that way.


I have never intended, with my website, to compete or undermine the efforts of David Allen, his colleagues, or his business partners. Quite the opposite, I have tried to encourage the use of the GTD philosophy and methods. Over the years, GTD has helped me greatly. The website is simply a means to pass along to others some of the implementation nuances that I have found most useful, and to stimulate thought about the myriad of possible approaches.


In the future, I'll try to avoid episodes like that of today by starting to focus less on one particular product or productivity scheme alone. A somewhat broader look at Outlook as a personal productivity tool will likely ruffle fewer feathers and expand the usefulness of my site to its visitors.


Sincerely,
Bill Kratz

Hello Bill, and The David Allen Company Community:

Please find below the response I received today from NetCentrics regarding the Open Letter that Bill wrote. I hope this will clear up any confusion, as neither NetCentrics or The David Allen Company has yet had the opportunity to speak in any way to Bill about this material.

Thanks for your patience!

FROM NETCENTRICS:

We were not at all offended by Mr. Kratz's poll--in fact we were looking forward to seeing the results ourselves.


We did not engage in a ballot stuffing campaign on our behalf. We have people in various locations, including our main two offices. Of the 40 people at NetCentrics,we know of seven people who voted on the poll. Several people voted twice because the first time they clicked they did not get a response so they clicked again.


We have been using the product since its alpha version last January. We find it to be a great tool to get things done and the votes were honest. If a few people from our organization did not vote, we would have been surprised. That being said, we'd be happy for Mr. Katz to remove our votes and continue with the poll. We will direct our staff not to vote.


We encourage people to find alternate ways to use Outlook to get things done and certainly encourage Mr. Kratz in his quest to find better ways to do things using the GTD methodology and promote the use of Outlook as a personal productivity tool. We agree that Outlook is a great tool to use for personal and corporate productivity. We certainly were not annoyed with the poll and did not attempt to "tamper" with the results. We believe that the more people who implement the David Allen Getting Things Done methodology and collaborate, the better the results for all of us and we are glad when people like Mr. Kratz take the time and effort to share their results with others.


It is our stated policy on our support forum that posts not dealing with product support or features will be removed. Feedback indicating problems or improvements to the product are welcome; however, if a post does not relate to the product it will be removed, per the support forum policy and purpose.