Another issue I have with placing too much emphasis on "Market Driven" is what does it actually mean? Who is your market? A market, in this context, is all of your existing customers plus all your potential customers whether they or you know it or not. In other words your customer base. I don’t believe anyone would agree with that as a definition of Market Driven. What Market Driven actually means is Market Analyst Driven (MAD
). I’m sure such an analyst would argue that they do indeed represent all the custom base but it’s their job to guess what a market wants, they don’t know. How do I know that? It’s simple really, if they were sure of something they’d do it themselves! I was talking with someone pretty high up at Microsoft and we were discussing market analysts. They told me a story about one particular well known analyst who published a paper misrepresenting a Microsoft technology. So they were invited to a Microsoft seminar and admitted they didn’t know the product and was forced to publicly amend their review. I’m not writing this to bash analysts, but what you have to realise is that these are simply the opinions of people that believe they understand your market, they don’t actually know and they do make mistakes. The emphasis of my high-school history class was to always qualify your sources. This leads me back to my conclusion from part 1, your should make decisions based upon a collection of sources not just one, and don’t assume that any of those sources will be 100% correct.
). I’m sure such an analyst would argue that they do indeed represent all the custom base but it’s their job to guess what a market wants, they don’t know. How do I know that? It’s simple really, if they were sure of something they’d do it themselves! I was talking with someone pretty high up at Microsoft and we were discussing market analysts. They told me a story about one particular well known analyst who published a paper misrepresenting a Microsoft technology. So they were invited to a Microsoft seminar and admitted they didn’t know the product and was forced to publicly amend their review. I’m not writing this to bash analysts, but what you have to realise is that these are simply the opinions of people that believe they understand your market, they don’t actually know and they do make mistakes. The emphasis of my high-school history class was to always qualify your sources. This leads me back to my conclusion from part 1, your should make decisions based upon a collection of sources not just one, and don’t assume that any of those sources will be 100% correct.
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