The Dangers of Predicting the Future

The instant-analysis business is a tricky one. None of us have working crystal balls; any attempt to predict the future, even the five-minutes-from-now future, is risky.

For example, on January 31, mere hours before Microsoft made its unsolicted $44 billion-plus offer for Yahoo, Forrester Research, my alma matter, posted a research note with the following headline and deck:

Microsoft Will Make Small Acquisitions
Its Size, Visibility To Antitrust Bodies, And Strategy Rule Out Big Deals

I'm not pointing this out to embarrass a particular firm. Most prognosticators play the same dangerous game. Indeed, Gartner Group, the leader in the tech-research space, has been known to quantify its predictions in its reports. When it expresses 90 percent confidence, it means that there's a one in 10 chance that its preimum-priced look into the future is out of focus. They're not sure.

We all want to know what comes next. It would be great to know in advance if buying that stock, taking that job, or marrying that person is the right idea. But we can't. As Salman Rushdie wrote during his years on the run from the fatwa, "Our lives tell us who we are." We can't know for sure how things will turn out until they happen.

But we can surmise the context in which the future will occur. We can aggregate early signals and make smart decisions based on them. Rather than calling outcomes, we're here to call trends, to cut through conflicting signals and discern the most powerful ones. We don't know which company will become the leader in multitouch devices, for example, but we've seen plenty of signals to support a contention that multitouch will be huge in the years to come. That's why I'm so excited about two just-around-the-corner events, TED and our own ETech: They give you a peek into the future, straight from some of the places where it's happening already.