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More Stupid Market Sizing Numbers
This time it's Radicati and the ridiculous numbers are for the "corporate anti-spyware" market. Part of me wants to just let it go because no one pays attention to this stuff anyway. But I started Security Incite to fight mediocrity in security research, so letting this go would cause me more heartburn than taking 10 minutes to pick it apart.
Here is the release. From a numbers standpoint, this is what they expect to happen:
According to the study, worldwide revenue from both segments of the anti-spyware market combined is expected to grow from $214 million in 2006, to $1.4 billion in 2010.
As I detailed in The Farce of Market Sizing, these numbers are not worth the paper they are written on. Clearly, Radicati believes there are lots of vendors and VCs that are still interested in the standalone anti-spyware market in order to justify publishing a report. Well, they are wrong.
I wonder who these folks are talking to do this research. Every conversation relating to spyware I had at RSA (with users and vendors alike) focused around how malware and spyware were basically inseparable moving forward. THERE IS NO STANDALONE ANTI-SPYWARE MARKET.
So projecting what the market will be in 2010 is just utterly ridiculous.
To be clear, and to make sure I'm going on the record here, anti-spyware is a feature. You'll see the standalone anti-spyware vendors either 1) get acquired, 2) broaden their offering to look more like a broad anti-malware play, 3) go away. That's it. Focused standalone anti-spyware vendor is not an option.
Could someone set a tickler in their calendar for March 2010 to remind me to poke these bozos in the eye again? But alas, that's the wonderful world of mediocre analysts. No accountability and no one with a memory long enough to go back and check the accuracy of these numbers.
Ed, that is a great point. I do remember the big blow-up with Radicati re:IBM/Lotus and it was actually covered prominently in a Forbes article that portrayed the blogosphere as villianous. That being said, the media will grab on to any news peg they possibly can because they get paid by the pound of news, not necessarily for quality.
I continue to be stumped by customers that actually take the word of these so-called "independent" analysts at face value. Many of these reports are in fact authored by the vendors themselves (I know because I used to be a vendor and I authored quite a few in my day).
Whatever. I could go on for days. Fact is, as long as the vendors believe that having anything on paper is better than nothing, we'll continue to see these types of folks in the market. The impetus is on folks like me to educate the broader public about what unbiased research is all about.