Columnist revealed as company's non-existent CTO

From CNET News.com: Devil Mountain Software has a bit of a credibility problem, according to a ZDNet investigation that revealed, among other things, that its chief technical officer is actually an alias created by a tech blogger.

Larry Dignan, ZDNet's editor in chief, revealed the ruse Sunday in a report headlined "Why we don't trust Devil Mountain Software (and neither should you)." Among his organization's findings were that the small software company's CTO, Craig Barth, was actually a longtime InfoWorld columnist named Randall C. Kennedy.

ZDNet, which is a sister publication of CNET, said it had intended to publish its findings Monday but was compelled to publish early after InfoWorld publicly severed ties with Kennedy. InfoWorld Editor in Chief Eric Knorr outlined the reasons for the move in a blog post Sunday:

On Friday, Feb. 19, we discovered that one of our contributors, Randall C. Kennedy, had been misrepresenting himself to other media organizations as Craig Barth, CTO of Devil Mountain Software (aka exo.performance.network), in interviews for a number of stories regarding Windows and other Microsoft software topics. Devil Mountain Software is a business Kennedy established that specializes in the analysis of Windows performance data. There is no Craig Barth, and Kennedy has stated that this fabrication was a misguided effort to separate himself (or more accurately, his InfoWorld blogger persona) from his Devil Mountain Software business.

ZDNet's investigation found that Barth didn't seem to exist on the Internet except when quoted in stories that appeared on sites owned by IDG, the publisher of InfoWorld and Computerworld. The company, which sells software that measures the performance of Windows has been, as Dignan described it, "a thorn in the side of Microsoft for years and is adept at garnering headlines." Devil Mountain Software, as Dignan points out, regularly makes headlines with reports on operating system and browser performance, with a special focus on Windows.

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