Great Moments in Marketing (con't)

A professor in graduate school once told me that BY DEFINITION, all forecasts were going to be wrong...which is another way of saying nobody can predict the future, no one has "special knowledge". But this forecast is so far off as to be worse than useless...as companies execute business plans based on what is apparently a giant mirage.

Leave it to the third largest Itanium server shop to put things in perspective.

A recent IBM presentation has helped show just how disappointing Itanium server sales have been. Sen Ming Chang, an IBM staffer, collected all of the IDC Itanium forecasts from 1997 through 2003 and plotted something that could be called the great leveling. Where IDC once predicted more than $30bn in Itanium server sales by the end of 2001, it now sees sales barely reaching the $7bn mark by 2007.

As The Register recently pointed out, a onetime IDC Itanium forecast for 2004 has come in a stunning 96 percent off the mark. We'll let that figure sink in for a moment. Remember IDC specializes in crunching numbers and predicting where various markets will go.

Best Quote:

It could be suggested that a monkey with a nasty crack habit could have been at least 90 percent wrong about Itanic.

Never heard the marketing department described quite like that.