Sam Lawrence Bitchslaps Gartner, But Still Likes Forrester

San Francisco: Sam Lawrence of Jive Software disses Gartner for truly bad performance, but has qualified but largely positive things to say about Forrester. I think he’s generous in giving Gartner a C-; sounds like it should have been a D.

Best of all, the Gartner ‘High Performance Workplace’ team hasn’t posted on their blog since February of 2007! There is no doubt in my mind these guys are dead.

The Forrester folks are extremely active, particularly Jeremiah Owyang, and Josh Bernoff. Sam says that Charlene Li has stopped posting, though?

Sam poses a few questions at the end of his post, which I am going to try to answer:

[from Go Big Always - Gartner and Forrester’s Report Card (so far)]

Q: Why, when presented with the opportunity to listen to huge companies actually using social software, would analysts not fall over themselves to listen to them?

A: Because many analysts live in a closed world working on market models and other rarified theoretical constructs. Its the rare ones that want to develop understanding of things on a bottom-up basis.

Q: Has anyone else experienced a report card like this?

A: Many companies buy the Gartner service to get written up in a report, in a magic quadrant, and then never use the service at all. Forrester seems more involved in actually advising people.

Q: Do enterprise companies still really use these reports to make buying decisions?

A: Let’s hope not.

Q Will insightful and credible people from Blogosphere make analysts irrelevant?

A: They are increasingly irrelevant. There are better minds out here, in the wilds, and the phony-baloney reports are only interesting to very senior old school IT folks. The smarter, younger IT types look to the web, or independent advisors.