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Comment by Zenst | Hacker News Reader

I skimmed thru and this caught my eye "Our EMM customer base is much larger than any of the other vendors in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Mobile Device Management – and is growing."

Not having heard of this "Magic Quadrant", I find it hard to see how the average consumer could take that seriously.

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I'm sure the average consumer wouldn't take that seriously -- however, this is not meant for the average consumer. This letter is definitely trying to appeal to business IT managers, and they sure love Gartner's magic quadrants. (They also enjoy whitepapers about best practices for implementing thin enterprise BYOD methodologies.)

As far as I know, those Gartner "magic quadrants" are fairly well-known in the circles of really large corporations. Which is apparently their target market.

The Gartner Magic Quadrants are treated very highly by senior management who often don't trust vendors or their own staff. They tend to be vacuous and of awful quality - I've started keeping historical ones so that at some point I'll be able to show how terrible Gartner are at predicting the future. But a surprising number of purchasing decisions are made on the back of these magic quadrants.

Here is the link to the 2013 Magic Quadrant for Mobile Device Management Software that is referenced in the post: http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1FRG59X&c...

I get that this is addressed to a specific audience, and it isn't me - but I don't understand how their position there is something to mention at all. They're a "niche player" apparently, where in this context that means they have a low ability to execute and incomplete vision.

"BlackBerry is positioned in the Niche Players quadrant and should only be considered for BlackBerry management or for cross-platform if iOS is needed and BES 10 has been purchased." sure doesn't sound reassuring either.

Not having heard of this "Magic Quadrant", I find it hard to see how the average consumer could take that seriously.

On an average day, I use software/libraries called Grunt, Mocha, Dust, Cheerio... and those are just NPM modules. Every industry has it's fair share of stupid names, they just don't seem so stupid when you use them all the time.

Huh... I hear about it every month or two. It's a pretty popular report Gartner puts out.

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