Neil Pollock and Robin Williams
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198704928
- eISBN:
- 9780191774027
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198704928.001.0001
- Subject:
- Business and Management, Information Technology, Strategy
This book explores the emergence of a new class of expert—the industry analyst—whose advice has enormous impacts across IT markets. In just over 30 years, Gartner Inc. has emerged as market leader ...
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This book explores the emergence of a new class of expert—the industry analyst—whose advice has enormous impacts across IT markets. In just over 30 years, Gartner Inc. has emerged as market leader with 40 per cent of the revenue of this $4.4 billion industry. Gideon Gartner in establishing the firm that bears his name created a distinctive model for offering and trading advisory services that could primarily help technology adopters facing difficult procurement decisions. The book will provide detailed empirical focus on Gartner’s innovations which include novel approaches to generating, validating, and defending their pronouncements about the digital futures (‘IT predictions’), their differential assessments of the capabilities and prospects of vendors in the market (through its signature product the ‘Magic Quadrant’), and its potent naming interventions (‘product classifications’). These assessments, though much criticised, are all highly influential, having reshaped understandings and actions within emerging and current technology fields. Drawing on recent debates within science and technology studies, economic sociology, accounting, marketing and organisation studies, the book examines the extent to which industry analysts’ advice is ‘performative’: framing understandings within sectors and pushing or ‘nudging’ innovation pathways or technology procurement choices in particular directions. The book argues that what may be at stake is less the performativity of knowledge and more how knowledge is performed.Less
This book explores the emergence of a new class of expert—the industry analyst—whose advice has enormous impacts across IT markets. In just over 30 years, Gartner Inc. has emerged as market leader with 40 per cent of the revenue of this $4.4 billion industry. Gideon Gartner in establishing the firm that bears his name created a distinctive model for offering and trading advisory services that could primarily help technology adopters facing difficult procurement decisions. The book will provide detailed empirical focus on Gartner’s innovations which include novel approaches to generating, validating, and defending their pronouncements about the digital futures (‘IT predictions’), their differential assessments of the capabilities and prospects of vendors in the market (through its signature product the ‘Magic Quadrant’), and its potent naming interventions (‘product classifications’). These assessments, though much criticised, are all highly influential, having reshaped understandings and actions within emerging and current technology fields. Drawing on recent debates within science and technology studies, economic sociology, accounting, marketing and organisation studies, the book examines the extent to which industry analysts’ advice is ‘performative’: framing understandings within sectors and pushing or ‘nudging’ innovation pathways or technology procurement choices in particular directions. The book argues that what may be at stake is less the performativity of knowledge and more how knowledge is performed.
Neil Pollock and Neil Williams
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198704928
- eISBN:
- 9780191774027
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198704928.003.0002
- Subject:
- Business and Management, Information Technology, Strategy
Who are the industry analysts who, by providing information about the performance and prospects of various offerings, are key to the current operation of IT markets? Despite their salience, little is ...
More
Who are the industry analysts who, by providing information about the performance and prospects of various offerings, are key to the current operation of IT markets? Despite their salience, little is known about them. The chapter considers how we may assess the influence of analysts. Do they merely describe the evolution of the sector? Do their knowledge outputs accelerate existing trends? Or do they shift or even redirect technology trajectories. The chapter links these interests to an underpinning theoretical concern with how we understand the ‘performativity’ of their expert knowledge. Callon (2007) has suggested that academic economists’ models are performative: aligning market behaviour to the predictions in their models and thus constituting markets. Does this model apply to wider business knowledge? Or should we explain the influence of industry analyst expertise by exploring the multiple interactions through which their knowledge is evaluated and consumed as well as generated?Less
Who are the industry analysts who, by providing information about the performance and prospects of various offerings, are key to the current operation of IT markets? Despite their salience, little is known about them. The chapter considers how we may assess the influence of analysts. Do they merely describe the evolution of the sector? Do their knowledge outputs accelerate existing trends? Or do they shift or even redirect technology trajectories. The chapter links these interests to an underpinning theoretical concern with how we understand the ‘performativity’ of their expert knowledge. Callon (2007) has suggested that academic economists’ models are performative: aligning market behaviour to the predictions in their models and thus constituting markets. Does this model apply to wider business knowledge? Or should we explain the influence of industry analyst expertise by exploring the multiple interactions through which their knowledge is evaluated and consumed as well as generated?
Neil Pollock and Neil Williams
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198704928
- eISBN:
- 9780191774027
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198704928.003.0003
- Subject:
- Business and Management, Information Technology, Strategy
The chapter explores how, in the late 1970s, Gideon Gartner reinvented industry market research around a novel concept of advisory services provided on a subscription basis to large numbers of ...
More
The chapter explores how, in the late 1970s, Gideon Gartner reinvented industry market research around a novel concept of advisory services provided on a subscription basis to large numbers of technology adopters as well as vendors and investors. The book examines some of the ‘innovations’ introduced by Gideon Gartner which helped constitute this distinctive new body of expertise. This included integrating research and analysis to increase productivity of analysts and developing methods to generate knowledge relevant for action. In place of long technical market reports, Gartner introduced new formats that could be quickly absorbed. Its various knowledge products include the ‘Hype-Cycle’ that tracks the lifecycle of the emergence and establishment of technology fields and its signature output the ‘Magic Quadrant’. The latter are highly influential but, given the impacts of their differential assessments on vendors’ market prospects, are often highly controversial.Less
The chapter explores how, in the late 1970s, Gideon Gartner reinvented industry market research around a novel concept of advisory services provided on a subscription basis to large numbers of technology adopters as well as vendors and investors. The book examines some of the ‘innovations’ introduced by Gideon Gartner which helped constitute this distinctive new body of expertise. This included integrating research and analysis to increase productivity of analysts and developing methods to generate knowledge relevant for action. In place of long technical market reports, Gartner introduced new formats that could be quickly absorbed. Its various knowledge products include the ‘Hype-Cycle’ that tracks the lifecycle of the emergence and establishment of technology fields and its signature output the ‘Magic Quadrant’. The latter are highly influential but, given the impacts of their differential assessments on vendors’ market prospects, are often highly controversial.
Jonathon Keats
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- November 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780195398540
- eISBN:
- 9780197562826
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780195398540.003.0010
- Subject:
- Computer Science, Programming Languages
“It’s really just complete gibberish,” seethed Larry Ellison when asked about the cloud at a financial analysts’ conference in September 2008. “When is this idiocy going to stop?” By March 2009 the ...
More
“It’s really just complete gibberish,” seethed Larry Ellison when asked about the cloud at a financial analysts’ conference in September 2008. “When is this idiocy going to stop?” By March 2009 the Oracle CEO had answered his own question, in a manner of speaking: in an earnings call to investors, Ellison brazenly peddled Oracle’s own forthcoming software as “cloud-computing ready.” Ellison’s capitulation was inevitable. The cloud is ubiquitous, the catchiest online metaphor since Tim Berners-Lee proposed “a way to link and access information of various kinds” at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 1990 and dubbed his creation the WorldWideWeb. In fact while many specific definitions of cloud computing have been advanced by companies seeking to capitalize on the cloud’s popularity—Dell even attempted to trademark the term, unsuccessfully—the cloud has most broadly come to stand for the web, a metaphor for a metaphor reminding us of how unfathomable our era’s signal invention has become. When Berners-Lee conceived the web his ideas were anything but cloudy. His inspiration was hypertext, developed by the computer pioneer Ted Nelson in the 1960s as a means of explicitly linking wide-ranging information in a nonhierarchical way. Nelson envisioned a “docuverse” which he described as “a unified environment available to everyone providing access to this whole space.” In 1980 Berners-Lee implemented this idea in a rudimentary way with a program called Enquire, which he used to cross-reference the software in CERN’s Proton Synchrotron control room. Over the following decade, machines such as the Proton Synchrotron threatened to swamp CERN with scientific data. Looking forward to the Large Hadron Collider, physicists began voicing concern about how they’d ever process their experiments, let alone productively share results with colleagues. Berners-Lee reckoned that, given wide enough implementation, hypertext might rescue them. He submitted a proposal in March 1989 for an “information mesh” accessible to the several thousand CERN employees. “Vague, but interesting,” his boss replied. Adequately encouraged, Berners-Lee spent the next year and a half struggling to refine his idea, and also to find a suitable name.Less
“It’s really just complete gibberish,” seethed Larry Ellison when asked about the cloud at a financial analysts’ conference in September 2008. “When is this idiocy going to stop?” By March 2009 the Oracle CEO had answered his own question, in a manner of speaking: in an earnings call to investors, Ellison brazenly peddled Oracle’s own forthcoming software as “cloud-computing ready.” Ellison’s capitulation was inevitable. The cloud is ubiquitous, the catchiest online metaphor since Tim Berners-Lee proposed “a way to link and access information of various kinds” at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 1990 and dubbed his creation the WorldWideWeb. In fact while many specific definitions of cloud computing have been advanced by companies seeking to capitalize on the cloud’s popularity—Dell even attempted to trademark the term, unsuccessfully—the cloud has most broadly come to stand for the web, a metaphor for a metaphor reminding us of how unfathomable our era’s signal invention has become. When Berners-Lee conceived the web his ideas were anything but cloudy. His inspiration was hypertext, developed by the computer pioneer Ted Nelson in the 1960s as a means of explicitly linking wide-ranging information in a nonhierarchical way. Nelson envisioned a “docuverse” which he described as “a unified environment available to everyone providing access to this whole space.” In 1980 Berners-Lee implemented this idea in a rudimentary way with a program called Enquire, which he used to cross-reference the software in CERN’s Proton Synchrotron control room. Over the following decade, machines such as the Proton Synchrotron threatened to swamp CERN with scientific data. Looking forward to the Large Hadron Collider, physicists began voicing concern about how they’d ever process their experiments, let alone productively share results with colleagues. Berners-Lee reckoned that, given wide enough implementation, hypertext might rescue them. He submitted a proposal in March 1989 for an “information mesh” accessible to the several thousand CERN employees. “Vague, but interesting,” his boss replied. Adequately encouraged, Berners-Lee spent the next year and a half struggling to refine his idea, and also to find a suitable name.
