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Just got an idea in mind, but I wasnt sure if its ethical.
As I look at the sales performance of different clients, (our Application customers), I can see some customers doing just average and might slip out of business soon, & on the other hand, some other customers from the same segment, size doing brilliant. May be the ones doing average is not even aware they can do brilliant.
How fair it would be to help them with a blunted out hint about how much they can do by quoting them the "possibilities" (which would be derived from different factors + other successful vendors data of the same segment).
I'm sure it's a sensitive business data security issue. So you'll have to hear my question correct.
I'm not going to give an exact figure of another company's sales. Or I'm not going to name any other company. I'm just thinking to draw a graph and show where he falls and where he could reach. A very generic graph.
I'm still feeling this may not be right. I'm not going to even do it. I might suggest this to my boss, if some of you feel this is okay to do & help out a sinking vendor with anonymous data to look up to.
Or is there any other way I could give a hint about how they could do better?
Watching their sales go down and do nothing feels like those Discovery, NGC guys who shoots documentaries of animals dying out of hunger but do nothing about it , other than continuing to shoot the video till its death. 
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy Falcon.
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I think it is ethically fine.  But I would be careful of how I word this when speaking to customers. I would not say "I think you could do this much better". I would just say "Maybe you find this graph useful.".
And... Some super stingy high performing customers might get a bit miffed if they get uninvited company at the top, but I would not worry too much.
... such stuff as dreams are made on
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Yeah how we word things definitely matter!
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy Falcon.
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Vunic wrote: . I'm just thinking to draw a graph and show where he falls and where he could reach. A very generic graph.
We do that. We have a slide in a presentation that shows figures for the customer on a bar graph and then also has Customer A, Customer B, and Customer C to compare against. We never share the other companies names.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy Falcon.
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That's an interesting question. If the data were publicly available, you might find a career as a business consultant -- you know, the person who walks into a company with sound recommendations on how to improve a business -- the kind of consultant that a company hires in its death throws.  Not that those people actually know what they're doing either, haha.
Consider though that your data is "insider information." Not only do you have the stats on the failing business, but you have the stats on the successful businesses as well. I would imagine that meddling with this breaks the confidentiality agreements of all parties. It's ripe for abuse. You may not abuse it in the traditional sense (like shorting a stock, or buying a stock that's cheap knowing it'll probably increase in value once you "fix" the ailing company) but once you open this can of worms, someone, somewhere, will start behaving unethically.
So, as painful as it sounds, don't. Businesses are not people, and they are not animals. Your comparison is faulty -- if a business fails, then those people will survive, learn, and hopefully go on to different things where they might be more successful. Unfortunately, it's not a cooperative world, it's a competitive world, and no matter how you look at it in this world, those other businesses that are doing well could (and probably will) get mightily pissed off if they find out that you're aiding their competition.
[edit] The only way to do this ethically is if the fine print, which no one reads, says that the anonymized data might be shared with others. But basically, before you do this, and before your boss says it's ok to do this, make sure you (and more importantly your boss) has consulted the legal team.
If you don't have one, get a lawyer's (or two) opinion.[/edit]
That's my 2c.
Marc
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In the US you need a lawyer for doing anything. In other countries not at all to the same extent...
... such stuff as dreams are made on
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 thank you very much.
I get it clear.
And many times people miss out the boundary line on security policy.
It always looks blurred and they naturally step into some unethical act, unintentionally.(Many cases)
Many of the dev folks handle customer data without any sense of data security.
They take a dump and put them on their home computer without any specific care, as if they were downloaded from facebook.
If only the management has a clear & strict policy, & keeps reiterating to the employees, nobody would give attention to it.
And about officially doing things on the products, I think we might have to consult with the customers (all the parties) if it's okay to exchange the metrics with other customers.
I think, none of the successful companies would like to do it. lol
Letting a customer die off is a bad thing for that company & as well as for us as too, apparently. I'm still thinking if there's a very fair, reasonable way of doing this. ( other than the fine print )
If it's a public listed company, it's an open book, no probs or I dont know I also get to see Private limited companies announcing their sales details to public media.
If our customers do such kind of press release, then nothing like that. Then it's a matter of adding a "Courtesy *" on the Graph 
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy Falcon.
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I would never do this. Even asking your clients for permission to share aggregated summary data anonymously is something that would trouble me if I were your client.
If you let on you are aware that some clients are doing better than others, I think you open a "can of worms." If I were a client in the "doing better" group, I'd be suspicious you might infer the strategic reasons for that, and share them. If I were a client in the "doing worse" group, I'd try to get you to reveal more about what the doing-better group was doing, etc.
cheers, Bill
«While I complain of being able to see only a shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is now, since I'm not at a stage of development where I'm capable of seeing it. A few hundred years later another traveler despairing as myself, may mourn the disappearance of what I may have seen, but failed to see.» Claude Levi-Strauss (Tristes Tropiques, 1955)
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Vunic wrote: but I wasnt sure if its ethical.
Consult an Attorney? Don't go to jail? Don't break any laws you are not familiar with?
Vunic wrote: I'm still feeling this may not be right.
Um, err, it is probably not right? See top of my most.
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Reading a German de.alt.netdigest post I realised that such had happened to me as well.
Citing Stefan Froehlich, free translation from German.
It happend two times that I found pages somewhere in the deeps of the web where somebody described exactly the same problems I was going to solve. Unfortunately,- there were no answers,
- the postings where some years old,
- and a deeper inspection showed that the postings where not only grepped from the Usenet respectively a mailing list, but had been posted by myself.
That was the time when I decided to stop my investigations on that topic.
For the young chaps:
*.alt.netdigest are moderated Usenet - Wikipedia[^] newsgroup collecting funny posts.
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Is usenet still on the go? or is it dead and buried....
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I decided to have look again a few months ago. I had it still configured in Thunderbird but have not pulled messages for some years.
It is still alive (at least the German newsgroups). But much less traffic than in the 90s and early 2000s. I still remember the names of many posters.
There is a big advantage:
Mainly longtime users with much experience in the technical groups and very few (if any) trolls.
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Jochen Arndt wrote: much less traffic than in the 90s and early 2000s
Usenet gets a few dozen TBs worth of new data every single day; that's why Usenet servers are no longer free. I'd say there's a lot more traffic on Usenet today than ever before.
Problem is...it's all crap.
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With traffic I meant the amount of text postings, not the volume of data transferred which is sourced by the binary groups.
The decline of the text postings can be seen by the statistics provided by many servers. If you don't need binary groups there are still free servers available like open-news-network.org.
With the text postings the quality has increased (at least in the groups I have subscribed). I have never used binary groups because it always was mainly crap.
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I've had that happen to me, in different flavors. The most amusing one is googling for a solution to something and getting a link to a Code Project article.
That I wrote.
Marc
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Was your article helpful or even provided the solution?
Or was it just another page beating around the bush
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Wade Frankum shot up a load of people in Strathfield Plaza with an AK-47 and I got married.
He's dead, but if he wasn't he'd probably be free now, I'm not.
Michael Martin
Australia
"I controlled my laughter and simple said "No,I am very busy,so I can't write any code for you". The moment they heard this all the smiling face turned into a sad looking face and one of them farted. So I had to leave the place as soon as possible."
- Mr.Prakash One Fine Saturday. 24/04/2004
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My commiserations - not, despite your moaning and bitching you are still married, suck it up sweetheart!
Like me you are either too lazy or too comfortable or just plain happy to be married to do anything about it. I'm coming up on 40 years married and am as happy as a pig in mud. Can you imagine going through the hassle of finding another woman who would put up with you.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Mycroft Holmes wrote: My commiserations - not, despite your moaning and bitching you are still married, suck it up sweetheart!
Like me you are either too lazy or too comfortable or just plain happy to be married to do anything about it. I'm coming up on 40 years married and am as happy as a pig in mud. Can you imagine going through the hassle of finding another woman who would put up with you.
Who would. Not starting with all that sh*t again after all these years.
Michael Martin
Australia
"I controlled my laughter and simple said "No,I am very busy,so I can't write any code for you". The moment they heard this all the smiling face turned into a sad looking face and one of them farted. So I had to leave the place as soon as possible."
- Mr.Prakash One Fine Saturday. 24/04/2004
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meh, I think you just replaced happiness with acceptance. That, or she brainwashed you 
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V. wrote: or she brainwashed you
No brainwashing required, good food did the trick nicely.
I recently had 3 months where we were in different countries, makes you appreciate the work the wife puts in to running even a small household.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Mycroft Holmes wrote: am as happy as a pig in mud.
Do you ever tell her that? Does she know?
Anyhow, I am happily married as well.
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