On his blog today, Ryan Healy rips on a group of the Old Gurus for some unethical and possibly illegal things they’re doing together. He references posts from a few people NOT in the group he’s talking about like Ray Edwards, Michel Fortin and the Salty Droid (if you’re sensitive to foul language, skip that one) discussing what’s going on.

Here’s the comment I posted on Ryan’s blog:

Up to a point, what these guys are doing is just smart business: build industry connections, promote each others’ stuff, time your product releases so that they drown each other out (not sure whether that’d be illegal or not by itself).

But if they’re promoting each other regardless of product quality or value for the price, that’s unethical at best. And if they’re agreeing to a pricing scheme or taking products off the market during other peoples’ launch periods to reduce competition, I’d expect the FTC to be breathing down their necks really soon.

I don’t remember all of these guys being so rabid about promoting so many things in past years. Some of them are definitely losing the respect I used to have for them lately. I’ve wondered recently whether the economy is hitting some of the big name guys a lot harder than they’re letting on, because some of them are definitely drifting into darker territory than I would have expected to see them in. What a shame that they can’t be happy with the honest money that’s still out there to be earned.

Some of the Old Gurus are compromising their integrity, opening an opportunity for the Next Gurus to come in and do things right…