Will the real slim Gartner analyst please stand up?

Larry Dignan is reporting from Gartner ITxpo in Orlando.

Last night, Peter Sondergaard said "The worst case is that IT budgets will be down 2.5 percent." Today, Jorge Lopez paints a much more depressing view including using the depressing Depression word.

My take: 

Peter and Jorge are two of Gartner's best, but unless production has become much more real-time since I was there, most of their slides were finalized 2-3 weeks ago. They have obviously been tweaked to reflect the amazing economic events of the last couple of weeks, but Gartner has not had a chance to survey its customer base, or indeed even take a detailed pulse of its own analysts.

So assign a probability of 0.2 to either Gartner scenario.

Give them a few weeks and you will get a nice, coherent view. Gartner research is always better with time and after its analysts challenge each other. That takes time.