How Accurate are Tech Predictions?

Abraham Lincoln once said, “The problem with quotes found on the Internet is that they are often not true.” At least according to a popular meme that is making the rounds on social media.

It’s a humorous way to illustrate how easy it is to circulate information now. Everyone is a publisher these days and that’s leading to a massive glut of information. And as Honest Abe warns, much of it can be inaccurate. Anyone can make any outlandish claim and if it gets repeated enough, it’s perceived to be true.

Which makes accuracy all the more important for industry analysts. As independent third-party resources, it’s our bread and butter. Clients depend on our research to make critical business decisions. They expect it to be factual and evidence-based, not exaggerated and designed to grab headlines.

\And yet we see a number of analysts firms proclaim remarkable upcoming trends annually, the majority of which never pan out. The more over-the-top, the more attention they get. And if repeated enough, it gets reported as fact with little to no media scrutiny.

For example, several analyst predictions for 2015 have completely missed the mark.

Microsoft Windows Phone was supposed to be the second most popular mobile device this year with 20 percent of the market. That same firm announced this year that Windows Phone had 2.5 percent market share for Q1 and Q2 2015 and dropped to 1.7 percent for Q3 2015.

40 percent of Global 1000 companies were supposed to use gamification as the primary mechanism to transform business operations. Not merely dabble or pilot gamification projects, but leverage it as the core means to make operational changes. Not even close!

The price of 80 percent of all cloud services will include a global energy surcharge. We regularly speak with end-users customers and not one has mentioned a global energy surcharge yet for a cloud service. In fact, the only mention I’ve found so far is coverage of this wacky prediction.

Industry analysts must resist fabricating headline-grabbing predictions to score cheap media attention. It not only clutters the public domain with misinformation, but it discredits the firm and ultimately tarnishes all industry analysts. It denigrates predictive research to crystal ball parlor tricks and cheap entertainment. And it confuses business decision makers seeking insight into real trends and guidance for the year ahead.

We take our predictions very seriously at Nucleus Research, knowing that our clients will leverage this information in their business assessments and buying decisions. In fact, we pride ourselves on our 94.2 percent accuracy rate in predictions over the past 12 years. And we’ve issued an accuracy challenge to our peers to review their own results and report how accurate they’ve been.

How do some analyst firms get away with such flagrant predictions in the first place? With information overload, their outrageous claims get lost in the shuffle. Call it short-term memory. But they forget long-term memory, where each irresponsible prediction chips away at the credibility of their overall research portfolio.

In the end, it always comes back to accuracy. The challenge is no longer to find information, but find information you can trust.