[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