Gartner, Forester, and the Vendor Age.

The old moto was lean on unbiased, trusted sources. The new moto is buyer beware and do your own homework. Long gone are the days of non-biased, informed “reporting” by Gartner, Forester and others. They disappeared much like the non-biased, informed days of anchor based news. Today everyone has an angle in the globalized “walmart-like” where cheap and/or commoditized things are sold cheaply.
During the dot com bubble, money was plentiful to spend on POCs, unbiased assessments, etc. However, if you look behind the vale there has been a fundamental shift that is much bigger than any single player. Gartner, Forester, and others are at best uninformed and at worst unbiased in this “vender” age as opposed to the “best practice” days of old. Unfortunately though the ecosystem they play in has changed, past perceptions persist in same way software lags 10 years behind hardware. One of the most universal laws applies here – things in motion stay in motion and the more abstract and larger you get, the slow the structure is to adapt to reality.
From a eagle eye’s view what has happened is industrial based research is gone. That puts the onus on the customer to do their own unbiased, in depth research or find responsible parties to do the same.