I have no idea how people end up on the magic quadrant but I had a good chuckle recently when I saw Vercel advertise that they are Visionaries in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ and when you look at the infographic [1] you become a visionary by just executing worse than the leaders.
I worked briefly on a Gartner (and Forrester) pitch for a services company. They do do an evaluation and you get to make your case. We had to compile case studies, highlight our competencies and the like. Put it in a deck and present it. Then they call up our references and get their input. We even had a consultant who specializes in helping companies with their rankings. As a services company, it was pretty similar to how we pitched clients and I gather the evaluation they did was also similar. I didn't get any hint of corruption in the process but I wasn't really in position to see it if it were happening. The execs seemed to take it seriously and put sincere effort into it.
I was aware of years ago parallel Forrester and Gartner evaluations of a new product my company was building. Forrester went through it in detail, even measuring number of clicks to access features and so forth. Gartner just did it all based on existing company reputation.
A few months ago I saw one of Gartner's AI Magic Quadrants (there are several) and it had IBM, Oracle, and a few companies I'd never heard of in the Leaders quadrant and OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the bottom left. Obviously companies like OpenAI and Google have absolutely no need to pay Gartner for anything. But how is this actually considered credible research by people in non-tech companies? You'd have to be living in a cave to not know who is really leading in AI.
That's astounding. I could see bragging if you're almost as able to execute but with a better future plan: "look at us, the up-and-comers!" But less ability to execute and a smaller roadmap? I think I'd be keeping my mouth shut.
I mean, look at the quadrants - they all can be spun positively.
- we have been named an "Industry Challenger"
- Gartner calls us an industry-focused "Niche Product"
- "Visionaries"
- "Leaders"
Like another comment stated, you get placed in different brackets based on how much you pay them to list your product. Niche guys didn't pay enough while the leaders are your usual suspects.
Every few years when I’ve gotten incredibly desperate I’ve gone on the Gartner site, then after looking at their average data vis artifacts, I realize it’s useless. But, I bet those major awards they give out put companies’ young employees in awe.
Coining new categories gives startups the validation they need to justify their differentiation, which is how they get launched. If the company coins its own category, prospective buyers will never find the product in the first place since they will not have not heard of the category. So companies like Gartner are serving a valuable function in the startup economy. It's the formalization of what Karpathy did when he coined the term "vibe coding", christening a new category.
> make up term as The Future
> put a lot of marketing firepower behind it
> make people pay to list on the magic quadrants
This is partially correct. My understanding is Gartner will also allow people to pay them to create the segment that exactly matches their product.