Alan Hargreaves' Weblog

Modifying your predictions does not make them true

I've been hanging off writing this as I wanted to think about it a bit first.

I'm referring to Bob Cingley's predictions for 2006.

You might recall that I made some comments on him changing the prediction so he got it right last year. Well, he's playing the same games again this year.

The actual prediction was:

Sun's Woes Continue

Still no good news for Sun. Those Galaxy servers are very nice, but they aren't enough to support the company and Eric Schmidt is too smart (I hope) to bail out his old firm.

And in his evaluation of his predictions he writes:

4) More bad news for Sun. That's true.

Notice the subtle difference. More bad news in the evaluation and Still no good news in the prediction.

Reading the prediction, one has to think that if Sun had any good news last year, then he scored a clean miss.

I definitely think we had lots of good news last year.

Like many folks in other forums who have commented on this particular prediction (When was the last time you saw non-Sun folks standing up for Sun on slashdot!), I think the question has to be asked, What axe has Robert X Cringley got to grind against Sun Microsystems?

Bob, if you have any shred of credibility left, you really should come clean and score #4 from 2006 a clear miss.

One other interesting thing that I just noticed from my prior discussion on this. In January last year, the Sun prediction was #5, it's #4 now. Did a prediction get deleted?

Technorati Tags: Solaris, OpenSolaris, Sun, Cringley

Posted at 03:31PM Jan 12, 2007 by Alan Hargreaves in OpenSolaris  |  Comments[1]