> The basic business model of Gartner is:

> make up term as The Future

> put a lot of marketing firepower behind it

> make people pay to list on the magic quadrants

This is partially correct. My understanding is Gartner will also allow people to pay them to create the segment that exactly matches their product.

Gartner stock price:

On the day this was published (2025-02-07) it closed at $529.29. Yesterday it closed at $238.37.

Source - https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IT/history/

Victory lap submission?

Ignoring the magic quadrant baloney and market growth predictions, Gartner and other analyst firms conduct some useful research based on large industry surveys on how companies and large organizations regard emerging technologies, or how they are planning to pilot or deploy new technology. This is especially true of in-house series conducted on a quarterly or annual basis, less so for vendor-funded research.

The data may pour cold water on whatever Big Trend is supposedly rising to the fore, or call out important caveats that vendors would rather not address.

Yeah, nah. The enterprise software market is nowhere near close to being upended by AI, and Gartner has their tendrils deeply wrapped inside of it. Small companies like Netlify which are barely in use by this market are not a canary in the coal mine.

large institutions dont buy into gartner because its accurate or even reasonably current. Gartner is part of a risk management strategy for shareholders. its a brand and reputation that you can shove in front of any problem you might encounter to insulate your companies reputation.

X, Podcasts, and Substacks offer up-to-the-second analysis of the latest trends and such, but at no point will they offer the type of indemnity that Gartner does. They are a technical resource, not a business leadership one.

Gartner isn't going anywhere.

How do I know?

Because they aren't actually selling software advice; they're laundering personal-responsibility for corporate decision makers.

That's the real business of most brand-name B2B "advice."

Very few people are dumb enough to believe the 22yr-old new grad from Ohio that created the powerpoint you're buying is an expert in Software (or management in the case of McKinsey/BCG/Bain, or law in the case of overpriced white shoe law firms, or accounting in the case of the big 4, etc).

But John Executive with the big house and 3 kids doesn't care what the actual advice is, or if your software will save the company millions. He just wants to keep his job.

Being able to point to a "trusted brand" like Gartner as the escape hatch for why you made a large decision with downside risk is priceless. That's the real grift.

"...so that software implementation didn't turn out well for us? Wow..who could have known? I followed what the trusted experts at Gartner said!"

G2, Sourceforge (yes, that one), and Gartner’s Capterra/GetApp/SoftwareAdvice all have the same business plan: charge vendors $x,xxx+ per month to outrank other vendors in their made up categories.

Of course, you can technically list for free.

But look! For the low low price of $x,xxx per month, now you can show one of 40 tailor-made award icons on your site!

Or, unlock the privilege of showing “user reviews” from our site on your site! (of course if you had managed to get reviews independently, you’re not allowed to use the widget without paying)

Don’t have reviews? Ah, I forgot to mention. The $x,xxx plan also comes with “review generation” — we’ll pay users to write reviews for you!

Oh, and on an unrelated note, the $x,xxx plan just also happens to unlock dofollow links across each of those 40 made up categories, which all rank highly in google. And the $xx,xxx plan means that - user ratings aside - you can end up at the top of those categories.

It’s hard to describe it other than the author says: a grift. Seeing those logos on other companies sites are now a huge turn off to me personally, and I haven’t yet capitulated for my own SaaS, but I suspect this isn’t the feeling of the execs they seek to target. Or maybe it is, and it’s just the price of doing business.

How are the architects and directors at my company’s IT department going to make decisions without Gartner? They don’t believe the people who have hands-on experience with the products. Who else can they go to for advice?

The web is already compostable

It is just a slighly classier (and more expensive) version of this:

https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/07/11/pay-to-play-the-ug...

I think this assumes Gartner just coincidentally offer the right kind of branding and messaging to drive $100M+ technology spending decisions at the present time.

I have a feeling the people running such a successful marketing machine are smart enough to know that over time, decision makers' tastes and preferences will shift as younger generations age into their target audience. Maybe they won't be able to pull it off but I suspect they're well aware that millenials will be listening to something different from their conjoined triangles of success.

Lately I've been trying to reprogram myself to be more self-critical when I run into successful products that don't speak to my own personal tastes - it's really easy to just say "other people are stupid" but I don't think it's usually the full answer. Gartner is kind of like the technology Consumer Reports for F500 executives - it's not really any different from you looking at the rating breakdown for a vacuum cleaner or kitchen appliance back when Consumer Reports was the go-to source for product reviews.

Baby boomer executives are not stupid just because they couldn't tell you exactly how relational databases and Linux work. And it's gonna be a while until insanely busy and established 65 year olds start making significant purchasing decisions based on anime avatar tweets, so Gartner's audience definitely shouldn't be underestimated.

I can neither parse the headline nor the subheading?!

My experience with Gartner has been seeing in-over-their-head CTOs in lagging firms take their recommendations a bit too seriously.

Earnestly printing out the latest white paper and distributing it to their directs. Hiring "head of X" for whatever new X Gartner has invented.

Thinking they are getting a peak at industry best practices when in reality the industry leaders are not sharing anything with Gartner, so its blind leading blind.

This leads to a lot of self delusion that actually being a lagger is an advantage because we'll simply buy XYZ that Gartner suggested and leapfrog over the leaders who are mired in their legacy tech.

No thought whatsoever to the people, processes and institutional knowledge that got the leaders to where they are. Nor any questioning as to whether there are actual off the shelf solutions for things your better competitors built in house with many man years of effort.

So the sooner the better ..

I've never heard of Gartner, or Netlify, or Composable, or.... I guess I should be glad for that... ?

This article implies that Gartner’s revenue stream comes primarily from vendors.

Does anyone know if that’s true? Gartner calls that whole arm of the business “insights” and doesn’t break it down further in their SEC filings.

I’d be surprised if that’s the case.

Well written. Coming out of college years ago Gartner was a whole section of review during my business courses. Working with Data for years now I have become hyper sensitive to this keyword grift; Big data, Data lake, Datalakehouse, realtime-analytics, no-code, data model, data schema...etc. People lean so hard on certain words as if they mean they are doing something different or unique. You work in one product in your company, then you bring someone who has experience in another product and they remark "But product X cannot do XYZGrift" but it can, people hang on these keywords as though they are platform actions or enablement that exist only there.

Rambling, but to get to the point, AI in general will strip this SEO/Marketing/Boomer catch phrasing, and build the common language which I appreciate greatly. I can go to ChatGPT or Claude and ask it I want to Foo this Bar with these filters, doesn't matter if its SQL, Python, Unix, Alteryx, Tableau... whatever, it digest the request without the fluff and responds commonly.

To stack on this info hunting or product research with AI is also typically less full of fluff for me. I don't have to deal with a sales engineer saying how wonderful their ML product is when I know its garbage immediately, I can just move on and assess the rest of the product.

The only value I can still see in Gartner is their customer survey information, but I am sure someone or somehow AI will scrape the forum post for all these products and weight the products community feedback about its product.

For me they always seemed as if a Wall Street Analyst is reviewing hardware

What’s really funny is that Gartner are probably the most reputable of the enterprise analysts. I had to cultivate these for years and could tell stories…

"Boomer C-Suites who fancy themselves Enterprise Tech executives and are happy to throw humans at any problem were happy buying off the Gartner catalog and then hitting the golf course. Today, millennial CEOs and CTOs get their analysis and news sources from X, /r/LocalLlama, the All In Podcast, Semianalysis Substacks, any number of YouTubes and Podcasts."

This reads like parody. I see another post in here talking about "Boomer catch phrasing" (in a word salad comment) which is simply hilarious.

While this millennial thought guru seems to think their age defines them, I think the rest of us realize that there are gullible rubes in every age group. There are fresh new recruits citing the gartner magic quadrant or whatever nonsense makes their world feel more orderly. I mean, LinkedIn is absolutely full of hilarious nonsense from people at every age trying to show that they Ordered The World because of some list or source they subscribe to.

Failure to make accurate predictions about the tech market is hardly evidence of grift. It's just really hard to do well. In areas that I'm most familiar with Gartner broadly comports with my own experience. It definitely favors entrenched players probably because they have so many case studies but honestly that heavily influences procurement teams too. There's always a strong thread of "let's buy what our competitors bought last year" and Gartner can reinforce that. As much as anything it's cover for a decision making process that's very difficult for a lot of orgs. That's valuable even if it's not very scientific.

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