A few days ago, a management consultant I follow on Twitter commented critically about a certain software vendor rating method, dubbed the “Magicke Quadrante” in this satire on the Web (shhh… like Voldemort’s, certain names shall not be uttered in this forum). He asked: “Were x and y coordinates so firmly etched in our brains that we can’t get away from it?”. It was hard to reply meaningfully in 140 characters, but I wrote: “it may be fairly simple: 1 rating dimension is rarely enough, >2 are hard to visualize, so we converge on 2, add thresholds = MQ” Not coincidentally, another Twitter correspondent pointed the next day to the “Periodic Table of Visualization Methods,” …

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