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<p>It's a matter of trust. Trust can also be perceptions, rather
than arduous and assiduous validation. Your experience there was
as you state it; how much insulation there is is very important to
Gartner, but also others.</p>
<p>In publications that I've been associated with, starting with LAN
Mag long ago (don't get me started about Harry Newton), there had
to be an ethical distancing, the famous "Chinese Wall" between
sales and editorial. <br>
</p>
<p>When I jumped to IDG in the mid 90s, I enjoyed the absolute
freedom to tell-it-like-it-is. That's a huge responsibility. It
means I have had to backup all objective assertions I make about a
product, and its vendor implications. I wasn't perfect, but we
were insanely dedicated towards making what we did reproduceable,
and working with vendors when expectations were clearly in error.
It also meant debugging their stuff. Often, they didn't know about
new products foibles because the products hadn't been in the
marketplace long enough, and if you put a toothpick in the middle,
it didn't come out clean. The software testers here in our
audience can tell you about the impossibility of regression
testing in the modern era. We tried to keep mainstream and eschew
the edge-case crazies. <br>
</p>
<p>Yes, vendors often knew exactly who we were, but their screwups
nonetheless, are long and sometimes tawdry. They're people, after
all, in a highly-pressured competitive space. Each new release has
to be proven in the market, but also to investors and/or Wall
Street.<br>
</p>
<p>After many moons sitting inside of a NOC making stuff work that
the salesperson said would work, we gained a lot of thick skin.
The industry today is little different. <br>
</p>
<p>The analyst community had a for the largest part, a grey scale
WRT quid pro quo. Some were more overt, others kind of beat around
the bush. A few said: just the facts, please. They were rare, and
I remember who they are. <br>
</p>
<p>A lot, I'm believing, happened on the golf course, or on
someone's marketing account. When the early SQL-on-PC was
occurring, and I covered that heavily, Oracle tried to invest in
me. Didn't do them much good, but I came to respect Marc Benioff--
who listened earnestly when this twirp from Indiana dissed his
stuff without reservation, then actually tried to do something
about it.... so different from Ray Lane and Ray's priors. Marc
still answers his emails (or a hallowed minion does). Apple was
initially the most constrained but every journalist on this
maillist knows the names of vendors that only speak when there's a
cattle prod or a highly-visible, fawning sycophant on the other
end of the messaging. <br>
</p>
<p>Today, only a narrowing handful of us are testing enterprise
stuff, because it's the vendors directly who didn't like what they
wanted to hear, and decided that killing the messenger was OK if
they could control their own spin. We know the list of who they
are, and what kind of journalist databases that they have on each
and every one of us. They play us. It's there job. Controlled spin
is the new new journalism. <br>
</p>
<p>Tom</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 12/29/19 5:18 PM, Sharon Fisher via
Ipg-smz wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAAqAu6T+ekBLm3og+yNfCe__uA_G6Vt7RArShe=5E3xAcpJQMQ@mail.gmail.com">
<div dir="auto">Vendors think everything is pay to play, including
magazines, which is where this discussion started. </div>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Dec 29, 2019, 2:46 PM
Alan Zeichick via Ipg-smz <<a
href="mailto:ipg-smz@netpress.org" moz-do-not-send="true">ipg-smz@netpress.org</a>>
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote">It is totally pay to play.
Vendors call it the Gartner Tax. <br>
<br>
-A<br>
<br>
<br>
> On Dec 29, 2019, at 4:21 PM, sjvn via Ipg-smz <<a
href="mailto:ipg-smz@netpress.org" target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer" moz-do-not-send="true">ipg-smz@netpress.org</a>>
wrote:<br>
> <br>
> On Sun, 2019-12-29 at 10:03 -0500, Tom Henderson via
Ipg-smz wrote:<br>
>> The Magic Quadrant racket is especially galling and
subjective, and<br>
>> if you're not paying Gartner to understand your
organization, then<br>
>> you're unlikely to have much movement. Only very
rarely will a non-<br>
>> payer move in a quadrant.<br>
> <br>
> I have been told on the qt by several former Gartner
analysts that the<br>
> Magic Quandrant is pay for play. I'm sure that comes as
no surpirse to<br>
> anyone here. <br>
> <br>
> Steven<br>
> -- <br>
> Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols<br>
> CBS/ZDNet, Contributing Editor: <a
href="http://goo.gl/FkYasd" rel="noreferrer noreferrer"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">http://goo.gl/FkYasd</a><br>
> ComputerWorld, Columnist: <a href="http://goo.gl/c02Km0"
rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">http://goo.gl/c02Km0</a><br>
> QOTD: “Bad things don’t happen to writers; it’s all
material.”—<br>
> Garrison Keillor<br>
> <br>
> <br>
> -- <br>
> Ipg-smz mailing list<br>
> <a href="mailto:Ipg-smz@netpress.org" target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer" moz-do-not-send="true">Ipg-smz@netpress.org</a><br>
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href="http://netpress.org/mailman/listinfo/ipg-smz_netpress.org"
rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">http://netpress.org/mailman/listinfo/ipg-smz_netpress.org</a><br>
<br>
-- <br>
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rel="noreferrer" moz-do-not-send="true">Ipg-smz@netpress.org</a><br>
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</blockquote>
</div>
<br>
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</blockquote>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Tom Henderson
ExtremeLabs, Inc.
+1 317 250 4646
Twitter: @extremelabs
Skype: extremelabsinc</pre>
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