Gottfried,
I just received this note from the President of Disk Trend:
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From: James N Porter <jporter@disktrend.com>
Subject: Re: SI post
Ben,
Thanks for sending the Silicon Investor posting. Market forecasting is hardly an exact science, but the gentleman had his facts wrong. Any reasonable market forecast is based on the facts as they are known at the time and as they can reasonably be expected to exist at a specific future time. The DISK/TREND Report has been around for 23 years, and various surveys over the years indicate that users think it's accuracy is among the very best of any technology market research firm. In this instance, at no time have our forecasts for high capacity floppy drives, such as Zip, ever exceeded the subsequent actual results by 40%, as claimed on the posting.
In last year's report on removable data storage, the 1998 projection for that product group was 15% higher than the final total for the year, and that difference was not due to Zip, but to Sony's introduction of drives which didn't work and their subsequent withdrawal from the market. The claim about greatly underestimating CD-RW drives is in the same class. Last year's report on optical disk drives was actually about 5% high on the forecast for CD-RW 1998 shipments, compared to the final quantity for the year, with that difference attributable to manufacturers' parts shortages -- they couldn't make enough drives.
The bottom line on this episode is that if someone wants to discredit a source of information, they discredit themselves if they don't get their facts straight.
Regards,
Jim Porter
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Ain't it the truth...............
Ben A. |
