You aren’t the target market for their “bloviations” - they are targeted at executives, and it isn’t like the executive pays this out of their own pocket, there is a budget and it comes out of the budget. Plus these reports generally aren’t aimed at technical people with significant pre-existing understanding of the field, their audience is more “I’m expected to make decisions about this topic but they didn’t cover it in my MBA”, or even “I need some convincing-sounding talking points to put in my slides for the board meeting, and if I cite an outside analyst they can’t argue with that”
Commonly with these reports a company buys a copy and then it can be freely shared within the company. Also $2,500 is likely just the list price and if you are a regular customer you’ll get a discount, or even find you’ve already paid for this report as part of some kind of subscription
Who might not have much of an engineering team, or not one with relevant expertise… and why should they trust the vendor’s engineering team? If they are about to sign a contract for $$$, being able to find support for it in an independent analyst report can psychologically help a lot in the sales cycle
While the most useful reports for sales are those which directly compare products, like Gartner Magic Quadrant or Forrester Wave - a powerful tool if you come out on top - these kind of more background reports can help if the sales challenge is less “whose product should I buy?” and more “do I even need one of these products? should we be investing money in this?”
My bills have been paid by working for vendors, where I have seen how sales and marketing use their reports in action. I have seen the amount of effort engineering and product management put in to try to present the best possible vision of their product and its future potential to these analysts. (I've never been personally directly involved in any of those activities though, I've just observed them from the margins.)
But, it isn't like the vendors have a huge amount of choice – if you refuse to engage with the analysts and utilise their reports in your sales cycle, what happens when your competitors do?
Hopefully they do the right thing and hand hashicorp over to Redhat so they can open source the shit out of it. So they can do things like make OpenTofu the proper upstream for it, etc.
"Modern digital businesses need to be able to adapt to changing end-user demand, and since feature flags decouple release from deployment, it provides a good solution for improving software development velocity and business agility," said Jim Mercer, program vice president of IDC Software Development DevOps and DevSecOps. "Further, feature flags can help derisk releases, enable product experimentation, and allow for targeting and personalizing end-user experiences."
Wait. What? This reminds me of the trope of the "wikipedia citation" in high school and college.. that move was worth at most a C+. Are you seriously saying these fucks actually seriously cite this bullshit? In this day and age where even crowdsourced wiki articles seem "credible"? What the actual fuck? I hate this shit.
lmfao what the fuck? The source they reference: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US51953724
These clowns want $2500 goddamned american dollars for the privilege of reading their bloviations on this topic, which i absolutely will not pay.
You know it's bad when the only people making money on this crap are management consultants.
Thinking back to 2014 using vagrant to develop services locally on my laptop I never would have imagined them getting swallowed up by big blue as some bizarre "AI" play. Shit is getting real weird around here.