Industry analysts, and those who want to understand them, should know about the annual Foresight course at PREST (Policy Research in Engineering, Science and Technology), part of Manchester Business School. Foresight stresses the scanning, scenario development and evaluation needed in forecasting technology. Lighthouse is keen to develop understanding of methodology on both sides of the…
A new paper from Berlecon is an important broadside against much of the rest of the analyst industry. The paper is only in German, so I thought I’d attempt a translation of the paper, by Dr. Andreas Stiehler. Of course, also look at our posts on statistics , biased samples and megamistakes. –oo00oo– Hunger for…
The Forrester (FORR) 2007 IT Spending Forecasts are out. Considering this week’s fall in stock on the Nasdaq, our post titled Preparing for a US slowdown, linked to growth elsewhere also stresses the need for vendors to look widely. Forrester’s analysis concludes that the region with the highest growth will be EMEA (which Forrester defines…
The Forrester (FORR) 2007 IT Spending Forecasts are out. Considering this week’s fall in stock on the Nasdaq, our post titled Preparing for a US slowdown, linked to growth elsewhere also stresses the need for vendors to look widely. Forrester’s analysis concludes that the region with the highest growth will be EMEA (which Forrester defines…
This month’s issue of The Marketer includes an article which claims that analyst influence is falling. Influencer50’s Duncan Brown has the byline on the article, which unsurprisingly includes no detail to support the claim. As we commented in October, while this claim is bound to get headlines influencer50 doesn’t seem to have any research that…
We don’t want to get stuck on someone else’s riff, but we had to comment on the new 2007 predictions from Gartner. According to a BBC story, blogging will peak in 2007, Vista will be the last major release of Windows, and the price of PCs will fall by 2010. Lighthouse’s end of year lunch…
Ancient kings pointlessly punished their alchemists when they failed to create gold, rather than question their own avarice. Frequent criticism of industry analysts’ inaccurate forecasts is similarly wasted. Humanity’s systematic bias toward overestimating the pace of change is amplified by the deep challenges in forecasting discontinuous, high-growth, markets. Forecasts will not get much better very…
There’s been a nasty spat over on ARmadgeddon over the question of whether industry analysts spend enough time researching. Look here, there and everywhere. The dispute is this: the clatch at ARmadgeddon think that analysts don’t spend enough time collecting data, and what they do collect is biased against the vendors. I disagreed. A former…