From the War Zone: Scopus Citation Tracker survived the Thomson attack

I am really having fun with the war analogy of the media. Information Word Review's headline: Thomson attacks Scopus Citation Tracker feature. via William's post at Issues in Scholarly Communication .

In the article Boby Pickering quotes Jim Pringle who is the VP of product development at Thomson and Amanda Spieteri who is the product marketing director for Scopus.

I am all for competition but I am not for "attacking" my competitor. Last year at NFAIS meeting in Phili, after watching Thomson Pharma presentation by Rachel Buckley who is the Director of Product Development for Thomson Scientific, I approached to her and complemented their work on Thomson Pharma.

Scopus and Web of Science are competing in the same market. It's like Google and Microsoft in search business. Users have different needs when they do a scientific search, and some of them are not even interested in citation searching. I think we should hear from the end users who are using these products. Let them decide which one they prefer to use and why (we may found out some of them may want to use both too) and send their feedback and comments on Scopus and WOS.

May be we should create a wiki or blog under WOS-Scopus and let the end users post their comments and feedback there. We can all learn from an open communication with our customers and improve the products.