Larry Greenemeier over at CMP takes the stand that “a new breed of IT analysts is sharing insights over the Internet, leaving traditional research firms trying to catch up using the same methods.” I disagree. Lots of things are shaking up the IT industry research business. Let’s set our standards a little higher than whether an analyst can blog.
Take Redmonk as an example. Redmonk is an interesting analyst firm because of the topics and positions its people adopt — not because its people blog.
Blogging did not unleash analysis “fast, free, and with a heavy dose of attitude” or the readiness “to pick a fight with IT vendors or one another”. These aspects of the analyst business have been part of the territory since Gideon, Howard, and Patrick staked the first claims.
And so has this: the rest of us measure the value of the analysts by the caliber of their market research and analysis. Not the repartee. Not the blogroll.
If we’re going to get excited about changes in IT research, then let’s get excited about breakthroughs that give us better industry research and more meaningful analysis.
Without that, there’s not much reason to get excited about analyst blogs.
The InformationWeek article: “Blog-Based Analysts Shake Up IT Research”.
As far as what’s really shaking up the analyst business: Here are some of my favorites. They mostly revolve around the quality, usefulness and accuracy of industry research… Interactive, realtime databases integrating with clients’ applications via Web services. Graphical and 3D representations of data. Wikis, portals and other collaboration, and globalization. New channel, retail and consumer tracking technologies. New survey technologies. New segmentation techniques. Outsourcing and offshoring surveys to increase frequency, validation and scope. Hybrid revenue and partnership models. New alternatives to vendor revenues for measuring markets. Replacing research catalogs with tagging and other metadata and adding streaming previews.
Tags: 
Leave a Reply