I’ve been spending the last week revising the combined service-provider survey for our Magic Quadrant for Cloud IaaS, and the new regional Magic Quadrants for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting.

With every year of revision, the way I ask questions becomes lengthier and more specific, along with the boldfaced “THESE THINGS DO NOT COUNT” caveats. These caveats almost inevitably come from things vendors have tried to claim count as X, with varying degrees of creativity and determination.

I consider my behavior part of a category I’ll call “shooting squirrels from the roof”. It comes from a story that a friend once told me about a rental agreement on a house. This rental agreement had all the usual stipulations about what tenants aren’t allowed to do, but then it had a list of increasingly specific and weird directives about what the tenant was not allowed to do, culminating in, “Tenant shall not shoot squirrels from the roof.” You just know that each of these clauses came from some previous bad experience that the landlord had with some tenant, which caused them to add these “thou shalt not” behaviors in great specificity to each subsequent lease.

So, I use the phrase “shooting squirrels from the roof” to denote situations in which someone, having been burned by previous bad experiences, tries to be very specific (often in a contract) to avoid being burned in that way again.

When I look at customer contracts for managed hosting and indeed, for services in general, I sometimes see they’ve got “shooting squirrels from the roof” contract clauses, specifying a list of often-bizarre, horrible things that the provider is not allowed to do. Those customers aren’t crazy (well, at least not entirely); they’ve just been burned before. No doubt if you’re in the services business (whether IT or not), you’ve probably had this experience, too.