Stardate 20011120.0524 (On Screen): It's fun to watch the antics of companies like Gartner and IDC. They're sort of economic whores; they've never seen a future market they didn't like, and their job is to grant credence to proposed business segments by writing reports predicting vast success. They loomed large during the dot-com bubble; at the time there didn't seem to be anything that they wouldn't predict would become a $5 billion per year market within five years. (Gartner was certain that thin-client home computing would be a $5 billion market by now, for example. Actually, every product in that segment has been a flop and none are being sold anymore.) Seems as if their sights have been lowered, now the
de rigueur number is about a billion and a half.
Of course, no-one keeps score, or we would discover just how empty their predictions were. It turned out that they never say "The business our customer is about to enter into is going to be a complete failure." So why does anyone believe them when they predict success? They always predict success.
Now they're predicting success for online sales of digital music. I think they're wrong about this one, too. They're saying that online digital sales of music will be a $1.6 billion per year business by 2005. I don't believe it, as long as the record companies continue their current policies. The only way that will happen is if the intellectual rights management crypto is cracked, so that people can freely use the music. But if that happens, the record companies will lament the fact that their $1.6 billion could have been $5 billion if only they were getting paid for all the copies being made -- and will miss the fact that if the crypto had not been cracked, their market would actually be more like $200 million as the customers stayed away in droves. (discuss)
