My first run in with Gartner was with an analyst back in about 2000 or so at a conference who told me that over 60% of the production installations of Active Directory would have to be rebuilt from scratch because people didn’t know what they were doing. I told him whoever came up with that stat didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. I still feel that is the case with much of what comes out of Gartner.
It is actually pretty funny, when Gartner says something a company likes with their magic quadrant stuff the company will broadcast that far and wide and when Gartner says something they don’t like they lugh Gartner off as a joke. I say do that regardless.
Anyway, this post is raised in support of a post by James Governor who was going to say something nice about Gartner and their magic quadrant stuff and posted a link to them and got a cease and desist letter. If I had the URL they didn’t want posted I would post it just to piss off Gartner. If you don’t want people linking to your stuff, don’t put it in the internet or protect it so people can’t link to it, don’t try to get all legal about it. That just proves you out to be a punk.
Fortunately, IÂ already had a poor opinion of Gartner so this did nothing to change that. 🙂
   joeÂ
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I wish I had a different opinion of Gartner, but I don’t. I’ve never had a good experience with them and I recall a time talking with some account reps for a technical company that had a run in with them. I liked them even less because of the alleged bad mouthing they gave the vendor until some free service and software started showing up. Not proven, but I chose to believe it based on what I’ve seen with them throughout the years.
And for all the times I’ve had idiotic morons (is that redundant?) hold a magic quadrant over my head or tried to pass of a Gartner report as their own work to their managers, I certainly enjoy hearing this rant. While I’ve worked with some good analyst companies in the past, ones that I respect for the objectivity and dedication to the work it takes to do this, Gartner doesn’t even come up on the radar for me when I need some sort of analysis or supporting information for a strategy. They have no credibility as far as I’m concerned.
Is there a “IhateGartner.com” website yet? 🙂
Joe, I suggest taking a closer look at the image at the bottom of the post. Not for any reason of course. Just for laughs & giggles.
Cheers,
Pam