Kieran Healy  Seeing the Market  Via John Gruber, Horace Dediu
looks at how poorly analysts fared when it came to predicting
the size of the market for the iPad. Apple sold just shy of
fifteen million iPads in 2010. (starting in April, when it
launched.) Every pundit with any kind of audience underestimated
how successful it would be, usually by a long ways. Moreover,
Philip Elmer-DeWitt notes that professional analysts (employed
by investment firms and so on) did much worse than
“unaffiliated” analysts with blogs, even when it came to just
the previous quarter:  In our ranking of the best and worst
Apple (AAPL) analysts for Q1 2011, which lists them based on how
accurately they predicted seven key numbers—revenue, earnings,
gross margins and unit sales—the unaffiliated analysts … took 9
out of the 10 top spots. The bottom 20 spots were all held by
professionals working for the banks and brokerage houses. Taken
as a whole, the numbers they sent their paying clients were off
by a margin (9.04%) more than twice