I have realised that most senior executives from IT vendors are secret fans of former Boyzone lead-singer Ronan Keating. Or at least, they are fans of his song from the soundtrack to the movie Notting Hill. You know the one - when Keating croons in the chorus as Hugh Grant fumbles his way into Julia Roberts' heart: 'You say it best when you say nothing at all.'

For example, last week Computing was invited to take part in a breakfast roundtable interview with Oracle president Charles Philips - the man who effectively runs the software giant on a day-to-day basis, and is in charge when his boss Larry Ellison is away losing in the America's Cup. All the main UK IT publications were there as well, so there was never any chance of anyone coming away with an exclusive.
During about 45 minutes of detailed and fairly in-depth questioning, Philips said pretty much nothing - certainly nothing new or especially newsworthy. He is a very capable man, his CV is extraordinary, he has been one of the main driving forces behind Oracle's aggressive acquisition strategy of the past two or three years, he is bright, intelligent, personable. Like most of his peers in Silicon Valley and in major IT providers around the world, Philips has a huge amount of interesting things to say. So why doesn't he say them?

Don't get me wrong - this is not a personal criticism of him, I'm simply using the interview as a recent example of a pervasive reality in the IT industry. The top people at most major technology companies no longer publicly say anything of value. Much of this is down to share price paranoia - the effect of a word out of place on a company's stock market value has led them all to be so cautious about their public utterances that what does come out is bland, PR-approved, on-message marketing platitudes. To be honest, Charles Philips was probably more interesting than most, and we will use a few of his comments in a forthcoming feature, but I was left feeling there was a better story to be told that was never going to come out no matter how good the questions.

In Computing, we used to regularly feature exclusive interviews with vendor chief executives. These happen much less frequently now because the articles were just becoming too dull.  Some of them you could have written before the interview took place - so predictable were the interviewees' comments.

It is a shame. Our readers, the UK's IT decision-makers, deserve better- after all, they are the people who buy the products that earn these business leaders their multimillion-dollar bonuses. The supplier bosses are some of the world's most influential executives, they should let their personality, experience and opinions off the leash.

You say it worst, when you say nothing at all.