Opacity versus Openness

There is much lying going on in the field of EPM software vendors.

- They lie about the people they hire —many of the new employees are in fact part-time (at best).

- They lie about their customers —some of the names you see on their “clients” webpages are in fact companies that have abandoned the experiment long ago. By keeping old customers in their listing and adding some brand-new prospects, they create artificially a cumulative effect so as to impress the gullible prospects that they try to hook up at those pitiful $400-a-seat vendor conferences.

- They lie about the benefits of prediction markets. Since (enterprise) prediction markets are just information aggregation mechanisms that can’t reach omniscience by essence, the only value of (E)PMs comes from the weaknesses of the competitive forecasting tools. Those weaknesses are not that numerous —hence, the applications of (E)PMs are probably limited.

- They lie about the successes that their customers got. There isn’t a single detailed business case published about EPMs.

- They lie about the real age of the prediction markets —they make it like PMs are in childhood, whereas the reality check is that PMs are in adulthood. The first batch of contemporary PMs popped up in 1988 —that’s 21 years ago, folks. The starting point of the PM hype was in 2003–2004 —that’s 6 years ago, now. It is not true to say that (E)PMs are a novelty. By now, we should be able to pause, assess their benefits, and tell the world where exactly they can make an impact (if any).

Because the lying is still going on, I have decided to downgrade the prediction market people and the prediction market organizations who are opaque —and to upgrade the ones who are open. I hope that my tougher stance will incite everyone to be more truthful.

ADDENDUM

An uncertain future – A novel way of generating forecasts has yet to take off. – by The Economist – 2009-02-26