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Comment by JacobAldridge | Hacker News Reader

Yup. This situation must be awful, and Matthew Evans has every reason for feeling so much more terrible even then he lets on in this post.

But he just pissed off IBM. And Faberge. And in all likelihood scared away a whole number of potential future customers who suddenly think 'if I talk to the Solid State Group, and then use someone else, are they going to bad mouth me to the whole world?'

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I'm Matt's business partner.

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.

You guys made the right move. Harvesting ideas from pitch work is disgusting.

Great work/creativity on your teams part. Faberge should be ashamed of themselves.

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.

Isn't it more like -- 'if I talk to the Solid State Group, and then steal their idea to use with someone else, are they going to bad mouth me to the whole world?'

Which doesn't sound like such a bad bridge to burn. Consider it a preventative measure to getting fucked over again.

You don't think Faberge will have a different version of events? After all, they gave what seems like a fairly detailed brief - in their mind they may think SSG added something 'simple' or 'obvious' to their own work, and they were entitled to use it.

I'm not saying that's the case - I really have no way of knowing. But the potential future clients are on the Faberge side of the pitching table, and may therefore see the story through that version.

Right - it's hard to pull things like this apart after the fact. Maybe they had already discussed something sort of similar previously. I know that when I've worked with design firms we have always tossed around a bunch of ideas before talking to the firm, and often just see what they come up with without our own ideas interfering. You're also dealing with a team at Faberge, not just one person...ideas percolate throughout the group beyond the people you're meeting with and once an idea takes hold there is no pulling it back.

What's so bad about charging for pitch work, if you're sensitive to this? I can understand feeling frustrated but I don't know that it was a deliberate snub.

Couldn't disagree more Jacob. They didn't badmouth IBM. They badmouthed the disgusting act of idea harvesting from creative companies.

I'm sure they wouldn't go public without the material to back up their claim.

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