If you want to know what the weather will be tomorrow, you can look to an app on your phone or in the paper or go online. There you will find a forecast based on the best information gleaned by specialists in the field. They pore over maps and sensor data that come in from near and far, all with the purpose of letting you know whether you should take an umbrella to work or not.
Even with all that their forecasts are hardly ironclad. That's why they hedge every statement and use percentages to qualify their outlook: "The weekend should be clear" or "Tomorrow expect a cloudy morning with a 60% chance of showers." Those kinds of statements mean that no matter what happens they are right. And it's what makes the converse also true: meteorology is the only profession where you can be wrong every day and still get paid.
Other professions are no so forgiving. If you are an analyst on Wall Street, you also examine data gathered from various sources and make a prediction. However your focus is not what's in the air but in the economy. Perhaps you are charged with predicting a company's outlook or the direction of the market. But with millions of dollars at stake as opposed to just the possibility of wet shoes, the accuracy of your forecast carries a bit more weight and consequence.
Still, like your brothers and sisters at the weather desk, you want to give yourself some wiggle room. And so you might hedge your bet, and say earnings will be between $2.00 and $2.12, or that sales indicate that the company should have a good quarter. But if you are a professional the expectation is that you won't be too far off. Get it wrong more often than not, and you will likely be looking for a new gig. The one exception is if you are an economist: as former assistant secretary of the Treasury Edgar Fiedler said, if you ask 5 economists for a forecast you will get 5 different predictions. Six if one went to Harvard.
And yet some things are all but impossible to predict. You can make an educated guess based on current trends or market data or historical precedent. But sometimes none of it matters, and a prediction is merely a shot in the dark. Still, others watching may require you to have an outlook. And so sometimes you are forced to put pen to paper and take a stand.
That's what the happened when Shuntaro Furukawa gave his usual presentation outlining the performance of game maker Nintendo. As president of the company, his goal was to update investors on the financial highlights, the outlook for growth, and progress towards numerous goals, from licensing new titles to physical stores to collaborations with other companies.
A key focus was on Nintendo's flagship product, the Switch. In the highly competitive videogame industry it is perhaps the most popular gaming system out there today. Not the most powerful nor most sophisticated (those titles go to Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's Playstation), its multiple versions, price and popular catalog combine to make it the platform of choice for many.
But in tech its always about the next big thing. And so while the company had a successful rollout over the past several months of a new portable version with a larger screen, that's already old news. The more important question is what are they doing for the next generation of gear? What is coming down the pike, and more importantly, when will it get here? The answer is on slide 41 of their presentation to analysts. Titled "Future Outlook," President Furukawa made it very clear that they have a plan. The slide shows that while the Nintendo DS made its debut in 2004, and the Switch in 2017, the Next Generation gaming system will come out in 20XX.
Uh, what? 20XX? That means that they have made a hard commitment to launch a new system sometime before 2100, giving themselves wiggle room of 78 years to come up with something. It's as if the weather forecast was "It'll rain sometime this year." On the other hand, it's likely a commitment they can keep. Because usually, by way of Edgar Fiedler again, he who lives by the crystal ball soon learns to eat ground glass.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford predicts he will write another column next week. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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