Five personal lessons from the life of President Truman — from forecasting to forthrightness — from the excellent biography by David McCullough.
Leave a CommentTag: Forecasting
Snap’s adventurous foray into the hardware market continues. Cheddar and then Verge reported that Snap is busy working on Version 2 of Spectacles. Here is Alex Heath from Cheddar: But Snap won’t stop with version two of Spectacles. The company has also begun work on a more ambitious, third generation of Spectacles with a new design and two cameras, the people said. Snap has prototyped an aluminum design with more circular lens frames and two cameras that would allow for 3D-like depth effects in videos. Snap has additionally considered including a built-in GPS and a leather case, as well as a potential price tag of around $300, which would be more than double the current $130 cost for Spectacles. Snap…
Leave a CommentIn analyzing Snap Spectacles, I discussed the value of early information, and argued how collecting early information is helpful. Production lead times for hardware products are long, and hence firms have to make huge commitments based on forecasts even before the demand starts trickling even as the product is being manufactured. Ideally, a firm would like its total production volume to match the final demand exactly. Being able to revise this production commitment can be a significant advantage. Even a small amount of initial demand can help correct orders or validate decisions with high confidence. Some recent data about VA 2017 elections from NY Times is useful in thinking about this problem in a different context. Below is a…
Leave a CommentI received an email note from a student in the Forecasting class (thanks: HT) about excess inventories of Snap Spectacles. The article on Information (subscription required) mentions that only (slightly more than) 150,000 units were sold and hundreds of thousands of unsold units sitting in warehouses. Snap contends that the sales exceeded their own expectations, but clearly the pre-sales expectations were high (as documented here and here). A lot of coverage was brimming with snark (some of it from the very folks who were excited about the product), and ex-post analysis of how bad the product is. I am no fan of Snap. However, I wanted to highlight a few points while providing a back-of-the-envelope framework to think about the…
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