Future Prediction

In this post, we will focus on the concept of forecasting and prediction method in the business context. According to Ogilvy (2015), forecasting is more about the estimate of a certain value in the future, whereas the prediction is the general estimate of what will happen in a period of time. Other people define forecasting as the basis of analysis of the past, and prediction as more judgemental and subjective to the future.

We will discuss a story about an American civil engineer known as John Elfreth Watkins who predicted a number of future technology and event in 1900 that turned out true today. Among those predictions, he was correct about the wireless technology we have today including instant access to photographs across continent especially in news reports and wireless telephone (Geoghegan, 2012). He said “Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence, snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later…. photographs will reproduce all of nature’s colors.” The idea of having an instant photograph share to another part of the world seem impossible during the time he wrote his prediction. In addition, he wrote this about the wireless telephone, “Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn.” International phone calls were not possible until 15 years later and it was not as easily as Watkins wrote in his prediction. 

The two forces behind the growth of wireless communication are changing market dynamics and the expansion of application and users. Firstly, wireless technology allows firms to expand their new services and products across continents. For example, software licensing was possible because wireless technology allows firms to specify users to operate. Other examples of market expansion are the broadcast of television and ratio, satellite communication and cellular telephone systems. Secondly, human wants the newest technology that can help them through each day easier with less headache, thus pushing the technology to improve every day like how we transited from using the communication from wired to fixed place-to-place to wireless mobile communication. The numbers of people using wireless communication have grown dramatically, and today we have approximately 300 million cell phone subscribers in the U.S. and 5 billion subscribers worldwide (“Introduction: Trends and forces reshaping the wireless world”, n.d.).

Reference:

Geoghegan, T. (2012, January 11). Ten 100-year predictions that came true. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16444966

Introduction: Trends and forces reshaping the wireless world. (n.d.) Retrieved from https://www.nap.edu/read/13051/chapter/3#17