Monday 26 September 2005

Governor attack!

Redmonk’s James Governor launches at the big ones: in this post (Why Forrester isn't part of the conversation. Its like NY Times Select) he describes why you need to be in the open to start the conversation. And in this one (How Gartner competes with IBM. we all do?) he assesses how the Borg is threatened by open source analysis, such as Wiki and blogs.

The issue for Gartner and Forrester is that he’s right: even if BigCorp, Inc will probably always spend some bucks with the Borg and others to cover their asses (analysts are quite open to the fact they’re often engaged to give their advice on a purchasing decision a posteriori just to justify the budget before their CIO or board), we think that the days of the subscription model are counted. The first victims will be door stoppers retailers such as the poor Butler guys, unless they can recoup the drop in subscriptions with their events business.

This said, the economic model for open source analysis is still challenging…

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

damn right we're challenging an old line proprietary monopoly.

i think you have your telescope the wrong way around. you say the economic model for open source analysis is challenging?

its *us* doing the challenging, and the oldline business models that are challenged. when food becomes scarce the little mammals can live on the crusts in a way dinosaurs can't.

the incumbents are struggling to work out what their role in the world is, and how to increase returns to shareholders.

the challengers meanwhile can concentrate on providing value to our customers.

Do you think JBoss has an economic model? RedHat?

Google even - they dont charge to carry out a search do you?

Open source challenges Microsoft, not the other way around.

Anonymous said...

read this blog -
http://www.beret.net/?p=318

ARonaut said...

Crumbs! We take the point James: agile and hungry is better than siloed and arrogant. Corporate history has a lot of examples to illustrate this. This said, we see most independent analysts struggling to make money...

Our advice to vendors? Spend your money with independent analysts, not Gartner -you'll get more pertinent advice and value for money.

Ian Skerrett said...

I agree with James 100%. Redmonk is challenging the big guys. They provide great content in an open enviornment. They are also building a community. Their value add comes from providing advice and strategy on how to leverage the content. This has to be the model the analyst industry moves to. Just take a look, it is how the software industry is moving.

btw, Eclipse is a client of Redmonk.