Thursday, April 27, 2006
High Tech Forecasting A Wasted Effort?
Posted by Jon Westfall in "ARTICLE" @ 06:00 AM
"In my other blog, I took the authors of a famous business book to task for making bad projections about future technological change. But it's not fair to single them out -- the same sort of problem happens to experts making projections inside technology companies. I've seen a lot of those projections over the years. The usual pattern is that technology predictions with a two year horizon are pretty good, because a technology has to be almost in prototype stage now in order to appear in high-volume products two years from now. Five year predictions are moderately useful, but subject to embarrassing errors. Ten-year predictions are almost useless, and twenty-year predictions are best used as plot outlines for science fiction novels."
An interesting piece recalling predictions made, results of those predictions, and even more predictions. But could they ever come true? What do you guys think, should we even TRY to predict what will happen in this crazy technical world we live in?
An interesting piece recalling predictions made, results of those predictions, and even more predictions. But could they ever come true? What do you guys think, should we even TRY to predict what will happen in this crazy technical world we live in?
