The Presenting Vendor Paradox
I think it’s ultimately a market failure due to natural incentives. As it turns out, very few people are both inspired and capable of doing research on a particular topic.
My friend Joel P. and I were talking about a recent Lawfare podcast where Matt Tait was on talking about the need for improved forensics on Apple devices.
Some people would balk at that, and say he’s horribly biased and you can’t trust anything he says. But there’s another way to look at that, through the lens of incentives.
Clearly not many people, otherwise podcasts and conferences would be overflowing with talk submissions from non-affiliated speakers. They’re not.
Most conferences and podcasts are full of people thinking about a problem because that’s how they make their living, which is tied to money, which they get from a company, which has an agenda.
We often can’t get a quality discussion of a problem without the participants having some significant financial association with one or more solutions.
