on 16 May 1997Market research industry share prices fell slightly today on predictions that next week’s MacUser editorial column will criticise the market research industry for being a bunch of jumped-up business-school button-pushers who couldn’t guess their own name if it was written in their shoes.
Editorial analysts estimate that MacUser editor Adam Banks will acknowledge the return to form of the UK’s electoral pollsters in accurately predicting Labour’s landslide victory (if you don’t count that rogue ICM poll for the Guardian that was bloody miles off but suspiciously timely in heading off any 1992-style complacency). However, he will go on to point out that one swallow doesn’t make a summer, and if you believe the predictions for Apple’s summer sales published this month by a leading international market research company, you’ll swallow anything.
There is a 76.54% likelihood that Banks will cast doubt on the credibility of a report claiming to identify the exact point at which a large proportion of Mac users will choose to upgrade their five-year-old systems, despite the fact that they all bought these systems for different purposes and have different financial resources and priorities.
Some analysts suggest that Banks will close by highlighting the irony that, when Apple finally gets some good news in the shape of positive hardware sales projections, it turns out on closer inspection to be bollocks. Others, however, expect him to add a final paragraph satirising the pseudo-scientific methods of the business prediction profession.
Bob Stupid, senior vice president for watching a roomful of students cold-call a couple of dozen know-nothing soi-disant IT managers who don’t know what they’re going to buy next week let alone next quarter and that’s assuming they still have a job anyway and their faceless corporate puppet-masters haven’t sucked out their brains and replaced them with dumb terminals wired up to a circular self-replicating intranet or outranet or extranet or whatever this week’s word is for subsuming the time to think and the ability to do into the all-pervading obligation to meaninglessly communicate, said: ‘I don’t know. I just push these buttons.’
Copies of the above report, priced at £5,000, are available by calling 0898-FLEECE-ME. If engaged, please call back outside Apple office hours.
adambanksdotcom Apple founder @ronaldgwayne has had several careers; on this showing, tech policy punditry could be a keeper