Q.  When does the statute of limitations run out on summarizing the top five posts of 2017?  A.  When this post is finally completed.

Top Five Posts of 2017

I’m always interested in assessing what my blog followers are reading, so I can:

• Sharpen my Google Analytics skills (which are woeful).
• Slightly better tune my content to your interests. (Those of you who know me know I am mainly interested in my own interests.)
• Better understand human nature.

Without further adieu, here are my top five posts of 2017:

#5. The Forrester Wave™: eProcurement, Q2 2017.  As always, the lure of free access to Forrester or Gartner assessments of markets is a powerful draw.  This is a testament to Forrester and Gartner’s marketing (and your desire for something free).  Forrester and Gartner really have built impressive brand names.  Maybe I should have bought Gartner stock during the post-bubble era?  Gartner’s stock is only up 5x since the market low in early 2009!

#4.  Gartner Magic Quadrant for Strategic Sourcing Application Suites.  See above.

#3.  Bessemer Venture Partners’2017 State of the Cloud Report.  More free stuff from one of the most respected names in venture investing.

#2. When Business Models Collide: HomeAdvisor and Angie’s List. Finally, a piece of original content and analysis!  In 2016, I did another very popular post on when different business models collide in the same industry with respect to AirBnB and HomeAway.  I think people really do find it interesting when two companies are selling pretty much the same thing, but the newcomer offers a slightly different product, with a very different business model.  I think of Ariba and Coupa, AmazonBusiness and Grainger, and even Pandora and Spotify partly in this light of colliding business models.  (Of course, the popularity of this post may just be that people looking for a contractor are mistakenly finding my site–which must be a big disappointment.)

#1.  (Updated) If PayPal has a Mafia, SAP Ariba has a Gang.  With this post, I updated one of my most popular prior posts, calling out some of the really talented people I had the privilege of working with who were now Ariba alumni.  This post proved a few things I already knew:

• People like to see their names in articles on the Internet.
• There a lot more people I did not know or failed to mention, that should have been in that post.
• It was an extraordinary time and group of people.
• I mistakenly left the impression that only the alumni of Ariba were worthy of admiration and that is not the case.  There are some awesome people who have stayed with SAP Ariba.  But the point of the article was to “compare” Ariba alumni to PayPal alumni.

Here’s to a great 2018!