Many jobs in product marketing or product management require your special attention - research only requires that you get someone good to do it. We can bring a level of objectivity to competitive research that's got to be lacking in you if you really care about your company or product. Currently we have two separate subscription services for each of our ongoing series - the North American Windows series and the International series. By 1999, we intend to add a North American Database Developer survey. Each survey series is conducted twice yearly.
Primary research is research that is actually conceived of and conducted.
It means that you actually do some real research, you actually interview programmers, you actually design the questionnaire and field it, etc. The reason we make a big deal out of this is that most research services who sell reports on a particular subject don't actually do any primary research. They simply use data that can be found elsewhere and then construct a lot of speculations based on that data. What you get are a lot of analysts' opinions and very little data. Our surveys are just the opposite - a lot of data with minimal speculation thrown in.