It's too bad there's no way to assign a universal "reputation" score to the various pundits out there so that readers can better assess the value of their published predictions. Michael Pachter, for instance, has been wrong on a number of occasions (he predicted Sony would dominate the current console generation and Nintendo would languish and MSFT would be #2 -- at least he got the last part right). Like the iPad wh…
I have to admit that I'm a consumer and I still don't get the iPad. It's like an underpowered laptop that I have hold instead of letting it rest in my lap. What could the benefit possibly be? But... here I am, eating my proverbial hat.
Netflix, on the other hand, I get. I had it early and people would say, "Why would you want to wait for your movie when you could get it at the video store?" I would explain that 1. I wanted movies I couldn't get at the store and 2. I generally had 2 or 3 going, so I wasn't without something.
It's just a matter of what you value and then projecting those values onto the observed behaviors of a large population. If you see a bunch of people going to the river you might think that they are thirsty, but in reality they want to go swimming. That uncertainty makes predicting hard.