Forrester Follows Gartner's Lead

from the failing-.coms dept

So, yesterday Gartner said most dot coms were going to fail. It didn't take long for Forrester to follow up and say the same thing. What interests me is why neither of these companies said anything about this when they were hyping all these companies a few months back.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  • identicon
    Anders Mcleod, 12 Apr 2000 @ 2:07pm

    Forrester flip-flopping? Imagine!

    There was a column about Forrester and Gartner a while back which I wish I could remember. Salon maybe? It outlined thier business strategy, which is to get quoted in as many publications as possible and to sell predictions to CEO's to include in business plans and SEC filings. They "don't keep track" of success/failure rates on their past predictions, and nobody else does either. Which is why it doesn't surprise me that the two companies always seem to say about the same thing, even in this case.

    If Gartner were to say 98% of dot-coms will fail in two years, and Forrester said only 40% will fail, people might start paying attention to who ends up being right. That would undermine thier whole business, because then the next time someone was writing an article about the future of B2B and Gartner says "B2B ecommerce will account for 78% of all monetary exchange by 2010", the reporter might actually ask them to back it up somehow. And they can't. But as long as they both flip-flop at the same time, Joe Public will assume they're both just re-evaluating thier predictions based on new data, and next week no one will remember or think twice when they read another article with a bunch of numbers based on blue-sky "research".

    link to this | view in chronology ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.