New technologies are coming along every day, and many of them must vie for the attention of decision-makers in business. Should our company upgrade to the new version of Windows, or skip a generation? Is Microsoft’s .NET worth the trouble? Is Linux sticking around for the long term?
Sometimes
these decisions are very expensive long-term commitments. A wrong decision here could mean millions of dollars misspent and perhaps the loss of your job.
As a result there are a number of technology analyst firms that make their money looking at all this stuff and writing reports about them. (See link) Then they charge big money for these reports, which contain predictions that are used to drive decisions.
You would assume that these companies have huge labs where they try this stuff out and torture test it to find out what it can and cannot do, right?
I’ll let you in on a little secret. They don’t have such labs. I’ve met analysts from many of these companies, and most of them have never even touched the stuff they are writing about! And yet here they are writing reports on which million dollar decisions are made.
I propose the formation of a “meta” analyst, whose purpose is to subscribe to the reports issued by these companies, and pore over them for predictions of market penetration, industry adoption of new technologies and so on. Then, in the months after the reports come out, track whether the predictions contained within come true.
Each analyst would be scored on how well they do predicting the future of the technologies they cover. This should be broken down by company, but also by the individual author of the report, since most of them focus on a particular technology or market segment.