The Truth About Market Forecasts

Lately, we’ve received several calls from prospective subscribers asking if we “do market forecasts.” Our answer is that market forecasting is not our specialty. The problem is that market forecasts are even less reliable than weather forecasts. Look at the discrepancies between EO’s and BIS’s forecasts discussed on page 2 of this issue. When GO first announced PenPoint in 1991, we were hearing forecasts of 20 million pen systems being sold by 1994. But, as Novell’s Ray Noorda quipped at a Dataquest conference a few years ago, “the one thing you can be sure about market forecast graphs is that they always start in the lower lefthand corner and go up at a 45 degree angle.” The only variable is the baseline starting point.

So, to make a long story short, we feel that we offer a much more useful service to our readers in concentrating on the technology and the products that are shaping the pen computer industry. From our coverage over the past 18 months, it doesn’t take a market forecaster to figure out that pen computing faces far greater challenges than some of its early cheerleaders anticipated. It is the technical challenges that are slowing down the growth of the pen market — challenges ranging from bringing down the cost of these devices to improving battery life and display readability, to finalizing a standard for PCMCIA cards, to obtaining bandwidth from the FCC for wireless communications.

These are the kinds of issues covered in this newsletter. We feel that understanding the technology, and we hope that we’re contributing to that understanding, will enable you to make some intelligent market forecasts of your own.