Good reply, Deb.
What I meant about the "slippery slope" covers a few fronts. And again, I use the term "Holyoak" specifically because I am talking about the company, and not your own actions.
Let me start with an assumption that Holyoak has developed some kind of great "bluegill."
Whenever something happens in the world that is better, scientifically superior, advanced, different than the norm, etc., there are two ways that the inventor can go:
1) The first way is to embrace the scientific world, or powers that be, and go through the efforts to explain what the "new" development is all about, and to hopefully gain some kind of acceptance. This way is tedious, risky, long-winded, frought with many pointless steps, and many times not commercially beneficial (due to exposing what may be trade secrets). I am not saying that this way is unrecommended or worthless in any way.
2) The second way is to go directly to the end-user and develop your market from there; and to avoid the scientific/academic world. In other words, state the benefits of the "new" development, but not really allow and third party evaluations.
It seems obvious to me that Holyoak has gone with method number 2. I say this because of the fact that there is no information available about growth rates, size ranges, etc., and no photos available. After some 30-40 years of being in that business, the fact that these things are not available is kind of a joke. But more so, it indicates a SUSTAINED EFFORT TO NOT REVEAL the aforementioned items (keep in mind, Deb, that this all predates your presence at Holyoak).
Now to current date. Holyoak is on this forum now, and with Gator's project, about to put everthing on the table to this forum. As I've mentioned before, this forum has some of the most prominent experts regularly participating.
Kudos to Holyoak if they are now taking the "nothing to hide" stance, however, this seems very different to how the company was before it's entry into PondBoss. This is also happening under a situation that you've referred to a few times being Ken's health.
Also, I am pretty unbiased to this whole thing.
PS: I also want to comment that I am not suggesting that you, as an employee, are doing something wrong or without permission. It just seems apparent that this experiment, especially on the forum here, is at variance to the prior modus operandus of Holyoak.
