Gartner's grift is about to unravel | Hacker News Reader

Gartner's grift is about to unravel

dx.tips

166 pointsmooreds79 comments

> The basic business model of Gartner is:

> make up term as The Future

> put a lot of marketing firepower behind it

> make people pay to list on the magic quadrants

This is partially correct. My understanding is Gartner will also allow people to pay them to create the segment that exactly matches their product.

"OpenAI top Leader in AI companies with a CEO named 'Sam'"

Coining new categories gives startups the validation they need to justify their differentiation, which is how they get launched. If the company coins its own category, prospective buyers will never find the product in the first place since they will not have not heard of the category. So companies like Gartner are serving a valuable function in the startup economy. It's the formalization of what Karpathy did when he coined the term "vibe coding", christening a new category.

Can we crowd source bullshit neologisms instead? GenA does it just fine skibidi Ohio.

I have no idea how people end up on the magic quadrant but I had a good chuckle recently when I saw Vercel advertise that they are Visionaries in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ and when you look at the infographic [1] you become a visionary by just executing worse than the leaders.

[1]: https://vercel.com/gartner-mq-visionary

That's astounding. I could see bragging if you're almost as able to execute but with a better future plan: "look at us, the up-and-comers!" But less ability to execute and a smaller roadmap? I think I'd be keeping my mouth shut.

The problem with sales and marketing is they kinda can’t keep their mouth shut. It’s a problem.

I mean, look at the quadrants - they all can be spun positively.

- we have been named an "Industry Challenger"

- Gartner calls us an industry-focused "Niche Product"

- "Visionaries"

- "Leaders"

Like another comment stated, you get placed in different brackets based on how much you pay them to list your product. Niche guys didn't pay enough while the leaders are your usual suspects.

the magic quadrant is essentially a stack ranking of 'how much money are you paying us vs how much money we think we can get out of you'.

that's how you end up in scenarios where some shit IBM product is leading the chart against its objectively superior competitors.

A few months ago I saw one of Gartner's AI Magic Quadrants (there are several) and it had IBM, Oracle, and a few companies I'd never heard of in the Leaders quadrant and OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the bottom left. Obviously companies like OpenAI and Google have absolutely no need to pay Gartner for anything. But how is this actually considered credible research by people in non-tech companies? You'd have to be living in a cave to not know who is really leading in AI.

> there are several

If by “several” you mean well over 100, then yes.

Over 100 just for the AI market?

It wouldn't surprise me that much. But no, I meant total.

Sure is magic for Gartner Inc.'s revenues... not so much for buyers.

I worked briefly on a Gartner (and Forrester) pitch for a services company. They do do an evaluation and you get to make your case. We had to compile case studies, highlight our competencies and the like. Put it in a deck and present it. Then they call up our references and get their input. We even had a consultant who specializes in helping companies with their rankings. As a services company, it was pretty similar to how we pitched clients and I gather the evaluation they did was also similar. I didn't get any hint of corruption in the process but I wasn't really in position to see it if it were happening. The execs seemed to take it seriously and put sincere effort into it.

I was aware of years ago parallel Forrester and Gartner evaluations of a new product my company was building. Forrester went through it in detail, even measuring number of clicks to access features and so forth. Gartner just did it all based on existing company reputation.

Every few years when I’ve gotten incredibly desperate I’ve gone on the Gartner site, then after looking at their average data vis artifacts, I realize it’s useless. But, I bet those major awards they give out put companies’ young employees in awe.

Top leadership at the company I'm at is trying to push AI down dev's throats in order to list in the magic quadrant.

Gartner stock price:

On the day this was published (2025-02-07) it closed at $529.29. Yesterday it closed at $238.37.

Source - https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IT/history/

Victory lap submission?

(im the author) i didnt submit this haha. thanks @mooreds for always having my back.

Is it too late to short?

Ignoring the magic quadrant baloney and market growth predictions, Gartner and other analyst firms conduct some useful research based on large industry surveys on how companies and large organizations regard emerging technologies, or how they are planning to pilot or deploy new technology. This is especially true of in-house series conducted on a quarterly or annual basis, less so for vendor-funded research.

The data may pour cold water on whatever Big Trend is supposedly rising to the fore, or call out important caveats that vendors would rather not address.

do you think, in so doing, they discover anything not obvious to an audience like HN which posts and shares insights themselves?

What they discover is what the CEOs would _like_ to happen for their business. Everyone is seeking an edge, and CEOs would like nothing better than hitching their wagon to the next buzzword. Gartner generates a buzzword, trials it with CEOs who make it an actual industry buzz.

Most HN readers don't have visibility into what a gaggle of CEOs is going to be tempted to do.

Agree. If you get past the baloney, the typical Gartner analyst is speaking with 50-100 CTOs per month. This is incredibly useful, as it provides a great general understanding of what companies are implementing, what is working, what is failing, what is no longer important, what is important. This allows them to become true mavens on their specific vertical or sub-vertical, sharing best practice. So this is definitely valuable, depending on how cutting-edge you happen to be.

and the author totally misunderstands this. ctos / execs generally are not offering their candid thoughts on how company X's products work to youtube. ec.

Yeah, nah. The enterprise software market is nowhere near close to being upended by AI, and Gartner has their tendrils deeply wrapped inside of it. Small companies like Netlify which are barely in use by this market are not a canary in the coal mine.

Yeah that. The company I work for has an annual revenue of about 6x the valuation of Netlify. We're busy sucking Gartner off at every possible corner and learning it's a mistake over and over again. Everyone we know is as well.

Some of the startup industry has no idea how enterprise is at all. There aren't even any trendy CEO/CTO here. It's all suits.

Not all things are sexy.

What do they use it for?

Purchasing decisions. If Gartner doesn’t claim you’re a Leader, then a massive chunk of your addressable market is not unlockable for you. This may be fine for now, but eventually when your investors demand accelerated revenue curves (and you’re not an AI coding tool), then you’ll be talking to Gartner and praying they place you high. Full stop.

Separately, they offer consulting with their analysts. A lot of these consultants are quite knowledgeable. They also are usually there to help a leader make a purchasing decision.

> and praying they place you high.

If you remove an 'r', there's the other way you can get placed high.

I will never trust Gartner for recommendations on anything. Either your product solve a problem we presently have or we don’t need it.

It’s really just the suits relying on it as a crutch in lieu of actually hiring competent Engineers and Architects and then listening to them. As those folks cycle out with their millions in cash to retire somewhere, I’m hoping us younger folks won’t tolerate such consultant drivel.

His point was not that the enterprise software market would be upended immediately by AI, but rather that the pay-to-play scam of analyst-powered purchasing advice is near the end of its lifecycle.

If you've ever been part of the process, you learn quick that it's one analyst who works whatever beat your company operates in who has an extremely poor understanding of your product, the market, or where it's headed. But they'll have a new catchphrase they've dreamed up and so it's just a game of saying "yeah, sure, we do that" and then paying money to be mentioned.

I still recommend to companies that they should endeavor to be put into a Gardener Magic quadrant because it can be transformative for enterprise sales pipeline. But I always feel bad for the purchasing decision makers as non of this is good data. I agree with swyx that automated deep research will phase this whole model out, which will be a net win for both companies and customers.

I wouldn’t bet on automated deep research until they figure out a business model that gives people a throat to choke. Enterprise software is a world where it’s more important to have another human you can blame for when you fuck things up than actually making a good decision. What incentive is there for an exec to say, “well I ran a deep research and it seemed good enough to me” when their boss demands an answer as to why $VENDOR was a bad choice?

I hear you, but the fellah in the org who says "Don't blame me ,I made this purchasing decision because they paid the most to an analyst firm" is definitely the neck I want to choke.

Sure. But Gartner is Gartner. They are a trusted brand and you can’t “hold them wrong”. And they also do a great job of being pulled into a meeting with the throat-choker to gaslight them into being fine with the decision.

Deep Research doesn’t do this, and even if it could today, human trust systems take a very long time to build.

Makes sense. The anthem of enterprise is "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM."

Gartner isn't going anywhere.

How do I know?

Because they aren't actually selling software advice; they're laundering personal-responsibility for corporate decision makers.

That's the real business of most brand-name B2B "advice."

Very few people are dumb enough to believe the 22yr-old new grad from Ohio that created the powerpoint you're buying is an expert in Software (or management in the case of McKinsey/BCG/Bain, or law in the case of overpriced white shoe law firms, or accounting in the case of the big 4, etc).

But John Executive with the big house and 3 kids doesn't care what the actual advice is, or if your software will save the company millions. He just wants to keep his job.

Being able to point to a "trusted brand" like Gartner as the escape hatch for why you made a large decision with downside risk is priceless. That's the real grift.

"...so that software implementation didn't turn out well for us? Wow..who could have known? I followed what the trusted experts at Gartner said!"

Yes this is an astute perspective. I would say a lot of consulting firms are basically little more than narrative devices in the bigger story of 'the economy'.

The children of elites need an avenue to fulfill their parents' expectations and propagate the legitimacy of the social order. Consulting firms provide that.

If ass covering is easy like that, what’s actually the argument for insane leadership comps?

There is no argument for it if the company is a legacy juggernaut with basically zero new product development (which is most of the Fortune 500).

Leadership comp is a total grift and has ballooned in recent decades (in the US exclusively) since the 1980s due to the shift to stock-based comp. Fun story, a lot of analysts didn’t even count stock based comp as part of the cost structure of a company until oddly recently.

If it's 100% dumb, then it seems unsustainable, as the brand will become tarnished, and no longer an escape hatch. It seems like it has to provide at least okay advice, or it isn't sustainable. I have no idea if that's what Gartner is doing or not, this is the first I'm hearing about them, and it's fascinating. I had no idea a thing like this existed. I guess maybe we're watching them pay for bad advice right now.

large institutions dont buy into gartner because its accurate or even reasonably current. Gartner is part of a risk management strategy for shareholders. its a brand and reputation that you can shove in front of any problem you might encounter to insulate your companies reputation.

X, Podcasts, and Substacks offer up-to-the-second analysis of the latest trends and such, but at no point will they offer the type of indemnity that Gartner does. They are a technical resource, not a business leadership one.

> to insulate your companies reputation

...and more importantly, allows you to keep your job should your choice not work out.

Gartner, like consultants, get paid for so management can pass the buck and not be held accountable for their decisions.

G2, Sourceforge (yes, that one), and Gartner’s Capterra/GetApp/SoftwareAdvice all have the same business plan: charge vendors $x,xxx+ per month to outrank other vendors in their made up categories.

Of course, you can technically list for free.

But look! For the low low price of $x,xxx per month, now you can show one of 40 tailor-made award icons on your site!

Or, unlock the privilege of showing “user reviews” from our site on your site! (of course if you had managed to get reviews independently, you’re not allowed to use the widget without paying)

Don’t have reviews? Ah, I forgot to mention. The $x,xxx plan also comes with “review generation” — we’ll pay users to write reviews for you!

Oh, and on an unrelated note, the $x,xxx plan just also happens to unlock dofollow links across each of those 40 made up categories, which all rank highly in google. And the $xx,xxx plan means that - user ratings aside - you can end up at the top of those categories.

It’s hard to describe it other than the author says: a grift. Seeing those logos on other companies sites are now a huge turn off to me personally, and I haven’t yet capitulated for my own SaaS, but I suspect this isn’t the feeling of the execs they seek to target. Or maybe it is, and it’s just the price of doing business.

I think this is the at same model that the NYTimes book reviews back had in the 1990s. Pay us money and we'll say nice things.

It'll be interesting to see how AI Agents approach things. My prediction is that more of our media is going to be controlled by our AI Agent's Algorithm instead of Google, Twitter, and Facebook's algorithm or some distant editors who decided what went on the front page of the newspaper.

How are the architects and directors at my company’s IT department going to make decisions without Gartner? They don’t believe the people who have hands-on experience with the products. Who else can they go to for advice?

Boy, am i glad i ran into you! I'd like to introduce myself: I am lead analyst for a new org named Rentrag! We do the opposite of Gartner, so you can trust us, And our analysis!

:-) /s

The web is already compostable

It is just a slighly classier (and more expensive) version of this:

https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/07/11/pay-to-play-the-ug...

I think this assumes Gartner just coincidentally offer the right kind of branding and messaging to drive $100M+ technology spending decisions at the present time.

I have a feeling the people running such a successful marketing machine are smart enough to know that over time, decision makers' tastes and preferences will shift as younger generations age into their target audience. Maybe they won't be able to pull it off but I suspect they're well aware that millenials will be listening to something different from their conjoined triangles of success.

Lately I've been trying to reprogram myself to be more self-critical when I run into successful products that don't speak to my own personal tastes - it's really easy to just say "other people are stupid" but I don't think it's usually the full answer. Gartner is kind of like the technology Consumer Reports for F500 executives - it's not really any different from you looking at the rating breakdown for a vacuum cleaner or kitchen appliance back when Consumer Reports was the go-to source for product reviews.

Baby boomer executives are not stupid just because they couldn't tell you exactly how relational databases and Linux work. And it's gonna be a while until insanely busy and established 65 year olds start making significant purchasing decisions based on anime avatar tweets, so Gartner's audience definitely shouldn't be underestimated.

My experience with Gartner has been seeing in-over-their-head CTOs in lagging firms take their recommendations a bit too seriously.

Earnestly printing out the latest white paper and distributing it to their directs. Hiring "head of X" for whatever new X Gartner has invented.

Thinking they are getting a peak at industry best practices when in reality the industry leaders are not sharing anything with Gartner, so its blind leading blind.

This leads to a lot of self delusion that actually being a lagger is an advantage because we'll simply buy XYZ that Gartner suggested and leapfrog over the leaders who are mired in their legacy tech.

No thought whatsoever to the people, processes and institutional knowledge that got the leaders to where they are. Nor any questioning as to whether there are actual off the shelf solutions for things your better competitors built in house with many man years of effort.

So the sooner the better ..

I can neither parse the headline nor the subheading?!

yeah, had no idea what that word jumble was meant to convey..

This article implies that Gartner’s revenue stream comes primarily from vendors.

Does anyone know if that’s true? Gartner calls that whole arm of the business “insights” and doesn’t break it down further in their SEC filings.

I’d be surprised if that’s the case.

They double dip. You pay them to review your company. Other companies pay them to read those reviews.

Right, but what’s the ratio? Every interaction I’ve had with Gartner suggests the vast bulk of their analysis revenue comes from “clients” rather than vendors.

Failure to make accurate predictions about the tech market is hardly evidence of grift. It's just really hard to do well. In areas that I'm most familiar with Gartner broadly comports with my own experience. It definitely favors entrenched players probably because they have so many case studies but honestly that heavily influences procurement teams too. There's always a strong thread of "let's buy what our competitors bought last year" and Gartner can reinforce that. As much as anything it's cover for a decision making process that's very difficult for a lot of orgs. That's valuable even if it's not very scientific.

I've never heard of Gartner, or Netlify, or Composable, or.... I guess I should be glad for that... ?

> I’ve never heard of Gartner

Which branch of the quantum multiverse are you in? I want to go there.

I'd like to explain, but I literally don't understand what branches I'd have to be in in order to have heard of them.

If you've worked at any large corporation in the US there's a good chance you would have seen a Gartner Magic Quadrant in a slide deck at some point, at the very least.

People use them as a way to justify their choices, because they're slide-deck friendly - just paste the chart and say "look, X is a leader on the Magic Quadrant, therefore we should buy X!"

The Magic Quadrant started out as a gimmick to kind of popularize Gartner's consulting services, but ended up becoming what they were most known for, to the point they now have to include disclaimers saying "uh guys? we do other stuff too, y'know?"

It sounds like I'd not only have to have worked at a "large corporation in the US" (I live in Canada), but have had a role that would have required sitting at meetings where business purchasing decisions are made.

There are a lot of programmers out there not meeting that description.

For me they always seemed as if a Wall Street Analyst is reviewing hardware

What’s really funny is that Gartner are probably the most reputable of the enterprise analysts. I had to cultivate these for years and could tell stories…

Well written. Coming out of college years ago Gartner was a whole section of review during my business courses. Working with Data for years now I have become hyper sensitive to this keyword grift; Big data, Data lake, Datalakehouse, realtime-analytics, no-code, data model, data schema...etc. People lean so hard on certain words as if they mean they are doing something different or unique. You work in one product in your company, then you bring someone who has experience in another product and they remark "But product X cannot do XYZGrift" but it can, people hang on these keywords as though they are platform actions or enablement that exist only there.

Rambling, but to get to the point, AI in general will strip this SEO/Marketing/Boomer catch phrasing, and build the common language which I appreciate greatly. I can go to ChatGPT or Claude and ask it I want to Foo this Bar with these filters, doesn't matter if its SQL, Python, Unix, Alteryx, Tableau... whatever, it digest the request without the fluff and responds commonly.

To stack on this info hunting or product research with AI is also typically less full of fluff for me. I don't have to deal with a sales engineer saying how wonderful their ML product is when I know its garbage immediately, I can just move on and assess the rest of the product.

The only value I can still see in Gartner is their customer survey information, but I am sure someone or somehow AI will scrape the forum post for all these products and weight the products community feedback about its product.

"Boomer catch phrasing"

really?

It's really funny how the younger people are creating derogatory terms about older people. It's also applied to people who actually aren't baby boomers, too. And they're repeating this, because the title of the article had it in the sub-title [1], and I found it off-puting. But hey, I'm just a sensitive old person.

Maybe need to expand their DEI trainig.

[1] "swyx recognizes $IT as a visionary short in the DX Tips Magic Quadrant of Boomer Relics That No Longer Make Sense"

As a non-sensitive old person and engineer, I find it hard to defend Gartner - it’s basically an organization devoted to propagating hype. FOMO as a service, essentially. “Boomer Relics That No Longer Make Sense” is a good description. Whether younger generations will be smart enough to reject it is another question. Middle and upper management are its own distorted thing separate from boomers.

It seems every generation will have this arrogance for their first ten years on the job. Then the next generation will declare them to be outdated dinosaurs and repeat the same mistakes in slightly changed form.

"Boomer C-Suites who fancy themselves Enterprise Tech executives and are happy to throw humans at any problem were happy buying off the Gartner catalog and then hitting the golf course. Today, millennial CEOs and CTOs get their analysis and news sources from X, /r/LocalLlama, the All In Podcast, Semianalysis Substacks, any number of YouTubes and Podcasts."

This reads like parody. I see another post in here talking about "Boomer catch phrasing" (in a word salad comment) which is simply hilarious.

While this millennial thought guru seems to think their age defines them, I think the rest of us realize that there are gullible rubes in every age group. There are fresh new recruits citing the gartner magic quadrant or whatever nonsense makes their world feel more orderly. I mean, LinkedIn is absolutely full of hilarious nonsense from people at every age trying to show that they Ordered The World because of some list or source they subscribe to.

Eh. They're not wrong. A lot of folks still pay Gartner money to be on their lists, but it's more of a feeling that you have to, and not because it actually leads to any results.

Having worked in both corporate and startup worlds, I've rarely seen anyone under 40 reference a Gartner report as credible or actually use that as a source of information. Everyone knows it's pay-to-play, not particularly credible, and as the younger generations age into these very senior roles, I have no doubt that Gartner will lose a lot of relevance.

Given that trust in "mainstream media" has pretty much collapsed everywhere, I don't really doubt that this will inevitably hit the obvious corporate gatekeepers as well. Enterprise/b2b is just 10-20 years behind on trends experienced elsewhere.

"People used to rely on this thing. As replacements come along and a bit of the magic was revealed to be a hoax, people rely less on that thing so it became less valuable."

Amazing, super simple to understand and without any need for hilariously shallow bigotry!

I haven't heard anyone in business -- like you, having worked in F100, corporate, startups, and so on -- reference a Gartner report seriously in well over a decade. From any age group. Whether "boomer" or super savvy YouTube-watching (lol) "millenial". I mean, I know they exist as this company still has revenue, but it seems like classic inertia where people are just going through the motions of historic norms as something is phased out, precisely why the market is looking poorly on the company.

Seriously, trying to tie the evolution of industry to some sort of tired, laughable ageist nonsense is just boorish. Be better.

When someone older yips about how younguns today are all cooked and they play Roblox all day, it looks like ageist shrieking from someone with little nuance and a very binary view of the world. It is no different when laughable pieces like this appear.

I lost a bit of respect for author, who I see frequently here on HN and elsewhere. I always thought they were reasonable, highly technical and have been casually following them since their svelte days.

Their pivot to AI and rebranding (from a dev advocate who did js frameworks to now suddenly being an expert of AI/LLMs) was inspiring but this take has left me with a poor taste in my mouth.

(author here) sorry you feel that way. this was just a rant because its fun to get unhinged every now and then - dx.tips is my outlet for that. if you see my work on latent.space and ai.engineer that's more representative of my "normal" self :)

Yeah poorly phrased, but swyx is a good & kind dude who will do just about anything to hep folks out. I think he's just understandably frustrated with a dated (and rather parasitic) business model.

And I've known some good Gartner analysts... I just want this market to evolve as a win/win for everyone.

I didn’t downvote you, but I do agree with the author. The boomer CTOs Ive worked under have almost always been incredibly unqualified and resistant to change. They are not moving in the same physical or digital circles and therefore need Gartner to inform them of where the industry is headed. I wondered at why they hold these jobs and my guess is that it’s due to “the people they know” which is usually boomers at other companies. Its a scam.

This passage completely undercuts the overall message the author is going for. The idea that the All In podcast or the remaining users of Twitter are authoritative is laughable.

I'm waiting for the OP to make an incorrect decision, but justify it because he vibed it on X and from a YouTuber.

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