As a worker drone who has spent my career in Sector 7G, I'm continually amazed at how many business decisions seem to be based on these "magic" quadrants. We spend 12 months building a capable and flexible infrastructure on Product A, only to have our management ask us why we haven't moved everything on to Product B, which is slightly closer to the top-right corner in the magic quadrant.

I always answer, "Sure, we could, if you're fine with not other progress getting made towards your business objectives for 6 months."

A former employer tried for years to get onto the magic quadrant, and never succeeded. Until they started paying gartner for access to their “specialist knowledge”, and suddenly they were on the magic quadrant … in the lower left, with gartner pushing them to pay more to get better access.

Magic quadrants are not kidding around.

I set up briefings to Gartner Analysts seeking to get our consultancy on a quad early in the mobile era.

One of them was on the earliest examples of hybrid HTML / native views in iOS. One of our engineers was implementing them in the Apple Store app.

IIRC, Gartner was not ready to split out boutique mobile dev but getting an earworm into an analyst with influence over a quad is still valuable.

I presume there is chatter on potential forming of quads before they make print.

Working these executive-influential information sources, and our firm continuing to land major app dev contracts led to an acquisition by Deloitte Digital.

Hmm... maybe the magic in magic quadrants is in how they attract the sorts of people that will act on the information conveyed by the grid. Way better than an Ouija board for IT recommendations. Ouija is very hit and miss, really depends on what spirit you get connected with. Magic quadrants just work.

/lol