Carter reincarnates as a Sage

Carter Lusher, the internationally acclaimed food critic, kindly sent us an email to let us know about his new life after HP (his original farewell post is no longer on hp.com but we've saved it here). Actually, it seems he sent more than one email since Duncan, Duncan, Babara and Jim already blogged the fact he's going back to relaunch Sage Circle, now free to blog with a revenge! For those interested,Duncan actually wrote quite a few posts on this competitor of his.

Sage Circle is already planning best practices events, training and we hope will continue its thoughts provoking blog posts in their new SageCircle blog.

So all the best to Carter and associate Dave Eckert.

In the meantime, we've been once more forwarded a SPAR post on predictions by Carter and thought it was interesting enough to post it below. Jonny also posted on the same subject: Analyst predictions 2008.

ARmadgeddon's take: too few analysts do review their past predictions, if any: check our list here. On predictions, we suggest to follow Carter's advice, but be a little more pro-active: do invite your analysts for a Xmas lunch (too late if you haven't thought about it till now) and ask about predictions. Better to be warned than surprised...

Previous posts on predictions:

• IDC misses forecast by 1900%
• Should research be priced according to freshness?
• Reviewing Gartner's Top Predictions - who will step up?
• Kudos to Gartner Analysts for Re-examining their Predictions – Now Gartner should make this a Standard Practice
• Grading pundits and prognosticators: More famous = less accurate
• Gartner's MCI blunder

Are you checking for the year-end prediction research notes? – Well, it’s thattime of the year when thoughts turn to holiday parties, mistletoe and… theannual deluge of analyst predictions for the coming year. The rollout of GartnerPredicts research notes started in November with 12 so far. IDC just releasedits “IDC Predictions 2008: The Post-Disruption Marketplace Takes Shape”, whichis available here to non-clients. It’s easy to miss these annual notes if youhave alerts keyed to your company name because often companies are not mentionedin the notes. However, your sales people can be blindsided by one of these notesif the analyst denigrates your market, even if your company is not directlymentioned. Don’t be surprised if the content of a prediction appears to be alittle wild-eyed and out of character for your favorite sobersided analyst –they are encouraged to write in an edgy style in order to be entertaining andperhaps get press attention. Oh, don’t forget to check the firms’ press releasesas well, because they can be different from the original prediction. I rememberthe brouhaha caused by a Gartner prediction in 2004 that by 2007 three of thetop 10 PC companies would exit the market. The original prediction did not causemuch of stir. However, the press release that came out a couple of weeks latersaid that HP was a likely candidate to get out of the PC market and that, myfriend, caused a real kerfuffle inside HP. Why? Prospects with multi-million PCproposals were literally waving the prediction in the face of HP sales reps andasking why they should sign the contract. Yowza.