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Comment by sambeau | Hacker News Reader

Serious Question: Why does anyone care what Gartner think?

I have worked with companies that cared more about getting into some quadrant of some Gartner graph than they cared about the quality of their products.

Is Gartner more than just a corporate badge? Do they purely provide the wall for the giant corporate pissing contest?

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To answer your question - Yes, they do.

I call this "shifting the burden of responsibility"[1] and it basically boils down to this - imagine you're an IT manager and your boss says "Should we support Blackberry anymore?" Who is the authority to say whether the answer is Yes or No to this question? If you (the IT manager) think you are...What happens when you're wrong? Hence why you simply shift this over to someone or some organization who has established themselves as the authority.

This is why the analyst industry exists.

[1] - http://www.techdisruptive.com/2013/07/18/shifting-the-burden...

In my experience it isn't the IT managers who trust Gartner —it's the IT-managers' managers.

Is this just because non-IT managers don't trust what IT managers say?

If so then this is a case of shifting the burden of responsibility of “shifting the burden of responsibility”. Non-IT managers blame IT managers for their use of analysts as a comfort blanket.

I realise there are analysts for all kinds of industry but I can't think of another example where analysts wield the kind of power that Gartner hold over the IT industry.

I think you're slightly taking my example too pedantically. In any case...

> Is this just because non-IT managers don't trust what IT managers say?

Yes, but the non-IT managers are even more uninformed. Everyone at some point is to blame, unless you can point that blame outside of your organization. Imagine this conversation going all the way up to the CEO. "But Gartner said to stop supporting Blackberry" holds some good value to her.

> Non-IT managers blame IT managers for their use of analysts as a comfort blanket.

I'm sort of confused by this comment, is this a statement you're trying to make? Either way, as you said, the key decision maker is usually the non-IT managers (usually at VP level or higher).

> I realise there are analysts for all kinds of industry but I can't think of another example where analysts wield the kind of power that Gartner hold over the IT industry.

I don't know many other industries that (1) have so many solutions (2) available to them globally (3) at so many different price points (4) with such a complexity of features. Finance rings a bell, but the competition is much higher.

Some good comments about the woes of the analyst industry in big tech: http://blog.softwareinsider.org/2013/08/09/personal-log-the-...

And how reliable is Gartner compared to let's say coin flip? Saying now blackberry is dead is post-factum. This was valuable info in 2010 but right now it is obvious.

> Saying now blackberry is dead

Blackberry is dead?!? What?! A company and device that sells 6.8m handsets is dead?!

its 6.8m handset sales in the quarter to the end of May[1]

> but right now it is obvious

Is it? Let's play a game...

Groupon and Twitter are/were built using Ruby on Rails. This is obvious, right? Does it mean IT depts should be ditching their .NET/Java shops for Rails? That answer is obvious right?

[1]http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/18/nokia-reve...

A company and device that sells 6.8m handsets is dead?!

Rough number: (sell 6.8M handsets per quarter) / (expected $1B loss this quarter) = they're losing $147 on every handset.

They'll have to raise the price on the device (every device sold) some 33% just to break even. And that's assuming sales don't plummet as a result of a significant price increase.

"I'm dead, I just haven't stopped moving yet." - Zaphod

> Rough number: (sell 6.8M handsets per quarter) / (expected $1B loss this quarter) = they're losing $147 on every handset.

That's not how it works.

$934 million of that $965 million loss comes from a non-cash charge for inventory and supply commitments. In other words, they lost money on the phones they did not sell. Assuming they can scale down linearly, this will not be a recurring expense.

Excluding non-cash charges, and adjusting for taxes, Blackberry lost $248 million last quarter. This is how much they lost on the phones that they actually did sell.

But even that's not quite good news. Because Blackberry sold only 3.7 million smartphones last quarter -- the 6.8 million number was for first quarter. So $248 million / 3.7 million = $67 loss per phone.

It's all about managers in BigCos. Barely literate as they are, they hardly read anything at all; Gartner reports (well, their summaries anyway) are among the few things they do consider. If you are in the right quadrant, you can say so while playing golf and get the manager to sign a big check for your s*it. He'll never actually use it himself anyway, it will just be forced on his underlings.

Companies have been made and destroyed on the golf course. It's a reality that sucks.

Gartner quadrants are like the App Store for enterprise software. When you're tasked with choosing say an app for handling Supply Chain Management often you're first step is looking at the Gartner report for that space because it gives you a good market overview of who the major players are in that space and how they relate.

Hence Gartner coverage can be a great channel for acquiring b2b enterprise customers. It also helps establish credibility.

Someones not going to buy a product just because a Gartner paper, but it provides a starting point for evaluating vendors.

Similarly no company is going to look at this and stop using Blackberry tomorrow, but it puts evaluating BB usage/potential migration onto their radar.

I was recently involved in a proof of concept for a rolebased access control tool for an enterprise, and we read the Gartner reports on the topic, where they evaluate the products in the space.

The tool we were primarily looking at, we could hardly recognize from Gartner's description - it was filled with factual errors.

Make you wonder what the quality of other Garner reports are...

Edit: Typo

I'm not 100% sure how the process works but from what I've seen, when the analyst is examining a company or product they work mostly with the website and other marketing materials, which makes it possible for the tool to do one thing while marketing copy says otherwise. That information is probably coupled with revenue, maybe some news analytics and relationship with the analyst to come up with the final determination. I believe how it works is still a secret but I'd sure love to know more about how it really works.

Gartner reports are the basis for big corp software evaluations(Wal-Mart's and the banks). If you have to sell software to fortune 500 clients, getting into the gartner quadrant is a must to be considered for evaluation. Gartner publishes magic quadrants for B2B markets(even niche ones).

It is paid significant attention to in the Big Freaking Enterprise. And by those who would sell to the BFE.

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