1. Stripped of all the paraphernalia these are yellow pages ranked by popularity in their domains.
2. They are in the business of selling customers to the said businesses. So their primary customers are businesses; restaurants, mutual funds etc.,
3. They need to maintain authenticity of impartiality so it's not easy to find out how they make money.
4. Their secondary audience is decision makers; CIOs, money managers etc., Think of -- "no one got fired for picking at the 1st ranked software from Gartner's list", "But Moody's rated it AAA, how was I supposed to know that fund would tank". It's a terrific CYA tool.
5. I'd say about 80% of the times they do a decent job of stack ranking. But there is an element of virtuous cycle there. The top rated "things" are popular because they are ranked to be so by these rating companies. Once a critical mass adopts then that tech/restaurant/etc indeed becomes numerically popular.
It's also worth noting that ranking companies don't rank products, they rank vendors. So a company that does everything kind of ok over multiple products can get an advantage over a company that solves one problem very well with one product, if the ranking companies choose to define the category in an overly broad way.
The one that wasn't is so much better and the magic one is still playing catch up. Most people that actually work in the field also consider the non-magical solution the best by far.
I really think this is just a 'who paid us the most' contest.
Ps I'm also an Enterprise IT architect and also leaving it. Not sure if my reasons are the same as I didn't get a chance to read the article yet :)
But in my case the reason was that we're becoming too much of a Microsoft shop. It went from 'Find the best solution and implement it' to 'Implement what Microsoft tells us to'. Usually those solutions are not the best and I end up having to find workarounds for workarounds. Sure all the integration is great but it's more of a walled garden thing than a real benefit.
Basically ruined the job for me.
