It's amazing how deluded many people are when it comes to their own abilities.  The longer I am alive, the more I pay attention to the people who don't toot their own horn and ignore the people that say they have all the answers.  On the whole, I think most people's abilities are conversely proportional to the amount they talk about how great their skills are.  The problem is that sometimes the very arrogant people are justly confident in their skills, and that leads us to believe that arrogance equals competence.

In short, the study showed that the researchers' predictions were spot-on. Participants scoring in the bottom quartile grossly overestimated their test performance and ability, and analysis confirmed that this miscalibration was due to deficits in metacognitive skill (the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error). Those who were incompetent tended to suspect that their abilities were unequal to the tasks, but the suspicion often failed to anticipate the magnitude of their shortcomings. As predicted, training the participants on the subjects in question increased their metacognitive competence, and allowed them to better recognize the limitations of their abilities.

This article questions some of the conclusions of the study, if only to be protagonistic.  I have often wondered how some people that I have had to work with ever got hired in the first place.   The funny thing is that once an incompetent person is given some of the skills, they start to understand just how bad they were before.

In some ways, I think this illustrates the difference between MS' and IBM's collaboration offerings.  MS is constantly telling you how good their solution is, yet we know that it's not fully baked and it doesn't compare favorably to Domino.  IBM, on the other hand, knows how good Domino is, so they think that their solution will speak for itself and that they don't have to toot their own horn.  The problem is that you really never know how good or bad a perspective employee or IT solution is until you hire/buy it and then it's too late to take what's behind door number 2.