IT Market Forecasting Increasingly Tricky
August 22, 2013
How big is cloud search? No one knows, because it is changing too fast to measure. That is the takeaway from eWeek‘s, “IT Marketing Forecasting Gets Dicey in Cloud Services, BYOD Era.” Forecasting firms have been recalibrating their tech-market predictions left and right. The article notes:
“In 2013 the major trends of mobile, cloud, social and bring your own device are rapidly altering the enterprise technology market. When you consider Microsoft reorganizing itself into a services operation, Dell working desperately to go private, Lenovo as the new leader in a declining personal computer market, and Samsung and Apple as the smartphone leaders, you get an idea of just how rapidly the tech globe is spinning.”
Writer Eric Lundquist supplies examples of forecasts that have been adjusted. He also examines specific developments, like the growth of Amazon Web Services and the bring-your-own-device trend, that have cast a fog around predictions. He concludes:
“All this goes to highlight the difficulty of forecasting a market that is changing beneath your feet. While you can add up actual spending, measuring lost opportunities, shifts in customer preferences and the attributes that cause corporate IT to abandon, for example, in-house development projects in favor of contracting with cloud services is not something that can be easily plugged into a spreadsheet.”
Indeed. The write-up suggests that researchers can overcome this difficulty once they capture enough customers’ thoughts about future spending. I am not so sure. Can we ever expect this market to settle down? Or is the pace of innovation only going to continue growing exponentially, leaving our tech prognosticators forever in the dust?
Cynthia Murrell, August 22, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
