Prediction Marketing
Posted on:: December 23rd, 2002
Scott Kirsner’s always readworthy column in the Boston Globe (here today, gone tomorrow) has a table with predictions by seven leading Boston tech analyst companies. I’m assuming that these predictions were volunteered by the analysts and thus should be counted as marketing tools.
| Analyst | Prediction | Comment |
| Aberdeen Group | “Widespread rollout of WiFi high-speed Internet access in metropolitan areas will put telecom companies’ ‘dark fiber’ to use…” | Safe but trendy: it got “WiFi” and “dark fiber” in a single sentence. (Won’t this be more like a sproutup than rollout?) |
| AMR Research | “Companies will invest in ‘enterprise performance management’ software that supplies executives with real-time information…” | Predicted every year for the past decade. Makes it sound like AMR has a big client in the “EPM” field. |
| Forrester | “The DVD will be the last physical format for recorded entertainment. After that, it’s all delivered digitally…” | Forrester gets the award for couching a provocative prediction in a mind-catching way. |
| Giga | “PC and laptop market won’t recover until 2004 or 2005 despite revolutionary new chips from Intel and AMD” | Ah, the “Courageously delivering bad news” approach. But loses marketing punch with the vague “2004 or 2005.” Giga might as well just say “Never.” |
| IDC | “There will be a major cyber-terrorism event in 2003, perhaps in response to a war in Iraq.” | Too Magic Eightball-y. Sounds like IDC is launching a Cyber-Security division. Besides, if there isn’t a cyber-attack in ’03, who’s going to go back to IDC to complain? |
| Patricia Seybold Group | “Companies will use new technologies like Web services to become much more adaptive to customers’ changing needs.” | Only if companies get forced brain transplants. Too transparently shilling for Seybold’s “Customer.com” brand. |
| Yankee Group | “The advent of ‘portable’ cell-phone numbers which can be transferred from one carrier to another, will spark a price war in 2003, leading to unlimited voice-calling plans for $50 to $60 a month.” | Solid, concrete prediction with numbers we can check in 2004. Since Congress mandated that portable numbers be available this year, it’s a fairly safe prediction. |
Note: I have no predictions of my own to offer at this time. I wouldn’t dare.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
>>”There will be a major cyber-terrorism event in 2003, perhaps in response to a war in Iraq.” pop-up ads and relentless stock tickers stomping on our heads, it should be obvious that the closed-source terrorist assaults have been relentless in their relentlessness, stunning even Barbie into scatological fits from the Tourette’s spores leaking past the java glue of email envelopes.
All that it would take to cause total breakdown now is the revelation that snopes.com has lied about everything. OMG OMG AUGGGH!!!!!