The analysts role in what comes next...

Since I don't really have time to write War and Peace today while I'm on the road, I'm taking on a few smaller posts. In this post from Mark Shavlik, he puts up a survey to gain some direction on future directions for the product. This is a great idea because customers can tell you what problems they have and if you see the same issue enough time there is likely a market.

But he also mentions that he's talking to some of the Big Research folks and this is kind of a quandry. If you are doing point releases to existing products, then that is fine. The analysts (the good one's anyway) talk to customers and can aggregate some of that information for a vendor.

Yet, if you are looking for a new idea or innovation - not so much. It turns out that most of the analysts will not be useful. I remember back when I was at META and we had some VC clients that would ask about some of the ideas they were thinking of finding. Almost always, I came back saying there was no market RIGHT NOW for that. I wasn't getting client inquiries. They got frustrated and I thought they were stupid since there was no market for what they were funding.

Many of them are not working anymore (or have bought winerys and airplanes). I am. Who is the stupid one now?

But that's the point. Analysts are good at telling you what's going on now. It's the rare analyst (I won't be so arrogant to say I'm one of them, even though I am :-) that can think 4-5 years out, even conceptually. They just aren't getting those kind of questions from customers, so they don't have any perspective.

As Clayton Christenson details in the classic "The Innovator's Dilemma" your customers will eventually send you down a rathole. So vendors need to understand if they are trying to innovate or maintain. They need to structure their market research accordingly.