“While we do not view Gartner as a serious competitor for The
Enquirer at the desktop, Gartner will not disappear from the
computing landscape through 2004…”
“With the recent slide into the territory of corporate shill,
and its current sucking up to multi-billion-dollar monopolistic
freakshows, the growing hype in the press over Gartner and its
variants, the question of Gartner’s viability as a mainstream
publication has arisen. While many feel that Gartner is the
heir to The Enquirer’s 2-bit crapola offerings and will soon
surpass the Star in volume shipments, we are not nearly as sanguine
about Gartner’s prospects. Gartner has achieved a level of
nonsubstitutable Hype and Baloney (see Note 1) and is tightly
linked with hardware and peripheral vendors as well as independent
software vendors (ISVs) and their kickbacks. To displace The Star,
for instance, Gartner would have to offer some compelling feature
or “killer Editorial” that is so overwhelming that it justifies a
migration. The problem is that any article that can be created
under the Enquirer can easily be paid for by Gartner, thus
obviating any advantage. We currently see three potential scenarios
for the future of Gartner at the desktop.”