Yes, the way GigaOm describes its Radar scoring differs between a 2023 blog post and its current methodology pages. The 2023 post describes a six-point scale and four plotted aspects. The current page describes pass/fail gates and three executive lenses. The practical lesson is to check the method date for any report you read.
What GigaOm said in October 2023
A GigaOm post from 27 October 2023 describes a scoring revision. Key points from that post:
- Scoring focuses mainly on differentiating features and business criteria, which GigaOm describes as non-functional requirements. Emerging features count for less.
- The scale expanded from four points (0 to 3) to six points (0 to 5), so exceptional products can be told apart from very good ones.
- Analysts scored four aspects separately: Innovation, Maturity, Feature Play and Platform Play. Each pair, Maturity and Innovation, and Feature and Platform, must have unequal scores, and the higher side sets the quadrant.
- Quality shows as distance from the center. Feature versus Platform Play describes character, not quality.
What the current pages describe
GigaOm's current methodology page describes something different in structure: a pass/fail gate with no score weight, three executive lenses at 30 percent each, a 10 percent persona weight, and four named quadrants that are unranked, with a separate velocity label.
I cannot say from public pages exactly when the change happened or whether older reports were rescored. The two descriptions are simply not identical, and that is the point.
Why drift matters
- A report from before a method change may not be comparable with one after it, even for the same market.
- A vendor quoting an older result next to a newer one may be comparing two different yardsticks.
- Terms such as Leader, Challenger or Outperformer can carry different meanings in different editions.
None of this means the work is poor. Firms improve methods. It does mean the report's own methodology section and date matter more than the firm's brand.
A habit worth adopting
When you cite or receive any analyst result:
- Write down the edition, publication date and market name.
- Find the methodology version that applied then.
- Check whether the criteria for your market changed between editions.
- Compare placements only within the same method.
An example of a bad comparison
Suppose a vendor shows you a result from an older edition and a colleague shows you a newer edition for the same market. The vendor's slide says it moved up. If the method changed in between, the movement may reflect the yardstick, not the product. Ask for the methodology version behind each result and compare the written analysis, which usually names strengths and weaknesses in words.
Quick check
Can I compare a 2023 Radar with a current one?
Be careful. Public descriptions of the scoring differ, so compare only after reading each report's own methodology.
Where do I find the current method?
On GigaOm's methodology and Radar pages, and in the report itself.
Safeguard publishes release information and a free scan, so your evaluation can rest on what a tool does today and not on an older result.
Sources
Last reviewed: 19 October 2026.
