A piece on the BusinessWeek site today, called “Mobile Ads: Not So Fast” caught my eye:
Ads on cell phones have long been hailed as the next big thing. But flipping through industry forecasts, Didier Kuhn says, “I don’t believe the figures I am seeing.” And he doesn’t mean that in a rah-rah kind of way.
Kuhn, CEO of a mobile advertising company acquired by Microsoft (MSFT) in May, views most analyst predictions as way too rosy. Gartner (IT) expects $11 billion in global revenue from ads on mobile devices by 2011, up from less than $1 billion a year now. Strategy Analytics sees an even bigger $14.4 billion revenue pie by then, accounting for a fifth of all online ad spending. These forecasts are “incredibly steep,” says Kuhn, relieved that his company, ScreenTonic, has Microsoft to watch its back as the market develops. “It will take slightly more time for the industry to grow.”
When did BW figure out that these analyst predictions might be just a tad optimistic? Because up until now, it’s been happy to feed the hype, repeating the same sort of wild predictions it today derides.
So which is it, BW? Or is this just another case where the media is happy to whip up the hype around something, just so it makes a nice, big, juicy target to knock down later?
I have been wondering for a long time, why industry analysts never publish their track record of past predictions, comparing them against what has really happened? This way, the best analysts would be able to prove their superiority against others, right?
I wonder.
So a couple of months ago, being bored, I decided to compare some predictions from 2003 against what has really happened in the industry. As a conclusion, I wrote in my Nokia internal blog:
“Now, how good do you consider that forecast? Personally, I find it pretty lousy. But I’m not saying that xxxxxx guys made bad job in 2003. On the contrary, I think their forecast represents pretty accurately what people believed in 2003. I’m just saying that it was impossible to do predictions with any reasonable degree of reliablitiy in the fist place.”
You can’t predict the Black Swans.
http://changethis.com/33.04.FewFar
Another story: five years ago, I was involved in a high-level technology strategy case, involving major technology choices. I read carefully through all the analyst predictions, until I realized that the decision we were supposed to make, would account for a whole third of the prediction!! So, the analysts had already predicted what we were going to decide… Right.
So let’s take predictions as they are, as attempts to quantify the current collective understanding - no more, no less.
Great post related to the same subject:
http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2006/02/how-to-read-tech-analysts-shipment.html