…please point me to an example of Forrester, Gartner, or any of those analyst houses having been at all consistently prescient about anything? I don’t mean “did one guy say something that came true;” I’m sure that, with enough analysts typing enough papers, they’ve all come up with one or two things ahead of the curve. Big deal. Value would lie in a wheat:chaff ratio greater than “1”, and I’m willing to bet nobody’s got one.

Seriously, these whitepaper factories seem to exist primarily to do logrolling with each other, or to extract money from muzzy-headed biz-dev types whose first thought in encountering any new technology is “how can I destroy the communication value of this thing by INVADING IT WITH MARKETING NOISE?”