Reality Check: What does Gartner really do?

They are useless.

I remember a while ago I was reviewing whole disk encryption products for a large financial services firm. Gartner had a strong admonishment against PGP's product because "Pretty Good Privacy" didn't sound very professional and the company wasn't very 'mature'.

They never mentioned that PGP wrote one of the first open implementations of public key crypto, had one of the best track records in the biz, or had a history of standing up to government pressure.

Talk about valuing form over function.

We ended up not going with PGP's product because it didn't integrate with our AD infrastructure very well and their odd licensing requirements, but the Gartner's report never even mentioned those.

I was highly receptive to this article given its title but it turned out to be a toothless disappointment. Despite Cringely's self-congratulatory sense that he is "attacking the temple of IT" and "alienating an entire industry," everything he says about Gartner et al could be applied to any type of consultant, and nothing he says is particularly surprising or revelatory.

I was hoping for an article exposing the fact that Gartner et al are actually pay-to-play extortion rackets run against enterprise software vendors. The software vendors need their products to appear in Gartner's supposedly objective reports, but, hey, surprise surprise, Gartner only covers those vendors who pay them for <sarcasm>totally unrelated</sarcasm> research services, and, hey, surprise surprise, the vendors that pay Gartner the most money somehow end up with the most favorable <sarcasm>objective</sarcasm> research coverage.

There is a symbiotic relationship between Gartner et al, enterprise software vendors, and corporate IT departments. The IT department managers have no incentive to find simple, cost-effective solutions to their problems because that would mean cutting their own budgets and headcount. Rather, they need to justify their bloated budgets and headcounts -- Gartner provides such justification. On the other side, the enterprise software vendors need to justify their overpriced, overly-complex software -- again, Gartner provides the justification. All three sides of this unholy trinity know that this is a racket and that providing real value and usability to the actual business users is beside the point -- the real point is to provide money and jobs to the IT departments, the software vendors, and, of course, to Gartner.

Will the real Robert X Cringely please stand up and point out how naked this emperor really is?

I once had to use some Gartner numbers and they looked really sketchy; they predicted that almost all desktop PCs would be the all-in-one iMac style in 3 years. I called up the main analyst (at a cost of $800) and asked him how he got the data.

After much hemming and hawing it turned out that he had sent out a questionnaire to 500 CIOs of medium-sized businesses, ~80 of whom responded, about their preference for this form factor. Nevermind that the vast majority of desktops are bought by large companies, or that the form factor has drawbacks which were not explained.

Total Garbage.

The reports are only as good as the people who write them and the depth they go in to. Often, I find the information is superficial, gathered from technical documents and whitepapers, without actual/significant usage/testing by them.

However, if you know nothing about the topic, atleast they do provide a ballpark of what to look at, even if it is a broken window fallacy (you look at what is there rather than considering what is not).

I used to make fun of Gartner (and the like). Then I went to an insurance company and people just didn't get the jokes :)

Naturally, I still told people my true thoughts and if you know how to justify your arguments and have the technical capability to back them up with action you will be absolutely indispensable. (That recent book list had a book related to this subject, go find it!).

Great thing is when you leave (and you will leave) they feel a real loss (not that you intend harm), and all you have is a gain. Welcome to The Industry.

Learn to hack your way through it, or become part of the problem :)

They're great at looking smart, but anyone that has taken stats 101 can see right through their surveys. Attended a conference once where people just drilled the so-called expert of all the flaws in the data-collection methodology. Felt kinda bad for the person.

What do they really do? They pass off shoddy reporting and questionable data gathering as facts to gullible people who work in large corporations.

About frickin time!