competitive-quadrant

Produces a two-axis competitive-quadrant report: a practitioner deliverable that scores every included vendor or offering in a defined market on two evaluation axes — Completeness of Vision (x) and Ability to Execute (y) — and places each into exactly one of four quadrants. Its center of gravity is the quadrant placement, backed by explicit inclusion criteria, per-axis scoring, and a per-vendor Strengths/Cautions pair. It captures declarative comparative-judgment knowledge, not a time-bound event or a step-by-step procedure.

This genre reproduces a generic two-axis competitive-analysis structure. It is not a Gartner Magic Quadrant and must never claim to be one — see Rules.

Pattern (industry: two-axis competitive-quadrant report)

1. Market Definition / Inclusion Criteria — the market under evaluation and the explicit, stated criteria a vendor must meet to be included (and what excludes one). No vendor appears without satisfying the inclusion criteria.
2. Two-axis evaluation — the evaluation framework: Completeness of Vision (x-axis) and Ability to Execute (y-axis). State the sub-criteria rolled into each axis and how each vendor is scored against them, every score traced to a cited source.
3. Vendor profiles — one profile per included vendor, each with an explicit Strengths list and a Cautions list, every point source-attributed.
4. Quadrant placement — the four quadrants — Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, Niche Players — with each vendor assigned to exactly one, justified by its position on the two axes. A two-axis quadrant figure is required here, rendered as a Mermaid quadrantChart (see Rules).
5. Context & Market Overview — the market forces, adjacent trends, and conditions that frame the placements and would shift them.
6. Methodology — how vendors were scored, how evidence was gathered and verified, and the limits and as-of date of the assessment.

Rules that keep it a competitive-quadrant report

• Trademark / not-Gartner caveat (load-bearing). "Magic Quadrant" is a Gartner trademark and a proprietary methodology. This genre reproduces only a generic two-axis competitive-analysis structure (Completeness of Vision x Ability to Execute, four quadrants). It MUST NOT claim to be a Gartner Magic Quadrant, use the "Magic Quadrant" trademark as a conformance or branding claim, or imply Gartner endorsement or methodology. State the caveat explicitly in every report this genre produces.
• The quadrant figure is mandatory and is always Mermaid. Render the two-axis placement as a fenced mermaid quadrantChart block — never ASCII art, an image link, or Graphviz/DOT. If the underlying data cannot support a rendered figure, say so in prose; a required figure is never silently omitted. Plain tabular matter (e.g. the scoring rubric) stays a Markdown table.
• State inclusion criteria before placing any vendor; an included vendor that does not meet the stated criteria is a defect.
• Every axis score, Strength, and Caution traces to a cited source; no orphan facts and no uncited placements.
• Assign each vendor to exactly one quadrant and justify it from its two-axis position; never assert a quadrant without the underlying scores.
• Annotate contested or preliminary evidence with an explicit uncertainty qualifier rather than hiding it; exclude only evidence that has been affirmatively discredited.
• Exhaustive coverage: place every vendor that meets the inclusion criteria; a silently dropped vendor is a defect.

Anti-triggers — do not use this genre for

• A narrative survey of a market's size, segments, growth, and trends with no forced two-axis placement of named vendors — that is market-research-report: broader in scope, descriptive rather than comparative, and it does not require every entrant to land in exactly one of four quadrants.
• A single evaluation with a free-form comparison table and no fixed two-axis quadrant shape — that is engineering: its Trade-offs table maps options against decision drivers, but it never forces a Completeness-of- Vision-by-Ability-to-Execute placement.
• An informal, one-design narrative weighing alternatives before building something — that is google-design-doc, not a vendor-comparison genre.

MIF frontmatter

type: semantic — a competitive-quadrant report is declarative comparative- judgment knowledge, not a time-bound event or a how-to. Climb to L2 with namespace (competitive-quadrant/<area>), modified, title, and tags when the review context supplies them. Set entity.entity_type to competitive-quadrant-report. Gate every output with mif-validate at its target level; the floor is --level 1.

Why machine-readable — the point of MIF here

The same document still reads as a human competitive-quadrant report and projects losslessly to JSON-LD and back — one artifact, two readers.

The L1 -> L3 climb (two exemplars)

• templates/good-l1.md — L1 floor: id, type, created + body. A complete, valid report with the required Mermaid quadrant figure, but opaque to a machine consumer.
• templates/good.md — L3 (highest this genre supports): adds namespace, modified, temporal validity, W3C-PROV provenance, citations[] tied to each vendor's Strengths/Cautions and axis scores, and a typed relationships[] graph (e.g. relates-to a related market-research report). Validate with mif-validate --level 3.

Author at the highest level the drafting context supports (grade down rather than fabricate). templates/bad.md shows the antipattern: a report that places vendors into quadrants with no quadrant figure at all — the single most load-bearing required element this genre exists to demand.