Magazine questions Gartner Group objectivity

INFORMATION WEEK has an article about the different people involved at a high level in the Gartner Group, the world's leading supplier of analysis to the industry.

Clients of Gartner spend around $100,000 on biztech research, the article says, and notes that Silver Lake Partners, a large equity investment firm, are members of the board of the outfit.

Individuals are also investors in Silver Lake, like Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, and Bill Gates, says IW.

The article says that "no one has suggested that Gartner's output has been tainted in any way" by the Silver Lake connection.

Yet people who take advantage of Gartner's services would like to know more details about this, it appears.

We've always found Dataquest Gartner to be a paragon of objectivity. Why, it was only two weeks ago that someone was saying that installing Linux on a PC was far more expensive in the long run than using Microsoft Windows.

That was in Barcelona at a System Builder Summit. And Microsoft was a major sponsor of the conference, and launched Office 2003 there.

But that was purely coincidental. Andrew "nothing moves the memory market like FUD" Norwood's slides showed the bill of materials (BOM) for an average PC these days but neglected to add in the cost of an operating system, as far as we recall. We asked Andrew about this when we bumped into him sitting at the bar like an aged hack one afternoon.

He said: "Oh, we just include the OS as a part of the TCO/Management equation". Or something like that. We've asked him to send a copy of his slides to us so we can reveal what the BOM actually is, but he's dived for cover, we thINQ... µ

L'INQ
Information Week