That's what they call "predicting the average". When a company that makes an entrenched product category (MP3 players) is under attack from competitors with a product that is displacing theirs (smartphones), and they respond by entering into the other product category, late, with only half the functionality of their competitors and ignoring much of the conventional wisdom, the typical case is that they will fail. That the iphone succeeded is a statistical anomaly. Basically they used fortune teller's tricks to predict technology.
Now, the interesting thing here for me is not how embarassingly wrong they were, it's how we misattribute being right to any kind of prescience or competence. The people who said the iphone was going to be a hit were making stuff up just as much as the people who said it would flop, but they were accidentally right. In reality nobody could possibly predict what the iphone was going to do in the market.
Fortune tellers use tricks because they have nothing else to go on. In the case of the iPhone, though, analysts had plenty to go on--heck they got a 2-hour demo of the product. This guy simply blew it.
He was even wrong in saying that the iPod was under attack by smartphones. The leading smartphones in 2007 all totally sucked at music.
Now, the interesting thing here for me is not how embarassingly wrong they were, it's how we misattribute being right to any kind of prescience or competence. The people who said the iphone was going to be a hit were making stuff up just as much as the people who said it would flop, but they were accidentally right. In reality nobody could possibly predict what the iphone was going to do in the market.