[Ipg-smz] Magazine Article - Dilbert Comic Strip on 2019-12-26 | Dilbert by Scott Adams

Tom Henderson thenderson at extremelabs.com
Sun Dec 29 22:47:29 UTC 2019


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tom


On 12/29/19 5:18 PM, Sharon Fisher via Ipg-smz wrote:
> Vendors think everything is pay to play, including magazines, which is 
> where this discussion started.
>
> On Sun, Dec 29, 2019, 2:46 PM Alan Zeichick via Ipg-smz 
> <ipg-smz at netpress.org <mailto:ipg-smz at netpress.org>> wrote:
>
>     It is totally pay to play. Vendors call it the Gartner Tax.
>
>     -A
>
>
>     > On Dec 29, 2019, at 4:21 PM, sjvn via Ipg-smz
>     <ipg-smz at netpress.org <mailto:ipg-smz at netpress.org>> wrote:
>     >
>     > On Sun, 2019-12-29 at 10:03 -0500, Tom Henderson via Ipg-smz wrote:
>     >> The Magic Quadrant racket is especially galling and subjective, and
>     >> if you're not paying Gartner to understand your organization, then
>     >> you're unlikely to have much movement. Only very rarely will a non-
>     >> payer move in a quadrant.
>     >
>     > I have been told on the qt by several former Gartner analysts
>     that the
>     > Magic Quandrant is pay for play. I'm sure that comes as no
>     surpirse to
>     > anyone here.
>     >
>     > Steven
>     > --
>     > Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
>     > CBS/ZDNet, Contributing Editor: http://goo.gl/FkYasd
>     > ComputerWorld, Columnist: http://goo.gl/c02Km0
>     > QOTD: “Bad things don’t happen to writers; it’s all material.”—
>     > Garrison Keillor
>     >
>     >
>     > --
>     > Ipg-smz mailing list
>     > Ipg-smz at netpress.org <mailto:Ipg-smz at netpress.org>
>     > http://netpress.org/mailman/listinfo/ipg-smz_netpress.org
>
>     -- 
>     Ipg-smz mailing list
>     Ipg-smz at netpress.org <mailto:Ipg-smz at netpress.org>
>     http://netpress.org/mailman/listinfo/ipg-smz_netpress.org
>
>
-- 
Tom Henderson
ExtremeLabs, Inc.
+1 317 250 4646
Twitter: @extremelabs
Skype: extremelabsinc

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://netpress.org/pipermail/ipg-smz_netpress.org/attachments/20191229/12f61110/attachment-0001.html>


More information about the Ipg-smz mailing list