Analyst influence diminishing further...?

A couple of months back we published a White Paper entitled Analyst Influence is Diminishing. What was remarkable about the paper's reception was its wide acknowledgement as fact, apart from one or two AR blogs. Most marketing directors and AR people we spoke to were pleased to have their views confirmed, but weren't hugely surprised by our promouncement. So much for being controversial.

One of the points we made was the dissipating influence of analysts, due to erosion of credibility. ARmadgeddon is running a poll on analyst "unpredictions" and has already recorded some examples where Gartner gets it wrong, mainly around its magic quadrant.

Our view is not that analysts are losing their influence. It is that analysts are having to share influence with other influencer types, that may be less obvious but just as important. Analysts have got predictions wrong for ever - at Ovum we used examples of poor predictions in our forecasting courses (politeness forbids naming offenders, except that one of them is me!).

Still, we enjoy with schadenfreude the current cycle of criticism...