Agree. If you get past the baloney, the typical Gartner analyst is speaking with 50-100 CTOs per month. This is incredibly useful, as it provides a great general understanding of what companies are implementing, what is working, what is failing, what is no longer important, what is important. This allows them to become true mavens on their specific vertical or sub-vertical, sharing best practice. So this is definitely valuable, depending on how cutting-edge you happen to be.

and the author totally misunderstands this. ctos / execs generally are not offering their candid thoughts on how company X's products work to youtube. ec.