For all his faults, John Gruber is perceptive and an incisive writer. I tried to dismiss it as his unwillingness to blame Apple's hardware or ecosystem, but I have to admit it — Gruber's right that tablet-only delivery wasn't the problem with The Daily. His assertion that an ill-defined audience and unnecessarily broad scope killed it is probably mostly on-target, too.
Gruber is perceptive and incisive, but post hoc analyses are dime a dozen. Show me a writer who predicts successes and failures of start ups and ventures at even 60% rate with explanation of why they will, and I'll be at awe.
> An impressive series of studies by Thomas Åstebro sheds light on what happens when optimists receive bad news. He drew his data from a Canadian organization—the Inventor’s Assistance Program—which
collects a small fee to provide inventors with an objective assessment of the commercial prospects of their idea. The evaluations rely on careful ratings of each invention on 37 criteria, including need for the product, cost of production, and estimated trend of demand. The analysts summarize their ratings by a letter grade, where D and E predict failure—a prediction made for over 70% of the inventions they review. The forecasts of failure are remarkably accurate: only 5 of 411 projects that were given the lowest grade reached commercialization, and none was successful.
They also get 55% on success for A-rated companies, which is also pretty good. It's not quite 60%, but it's very close, and considering how much above 60% they get on predicting failures, I think that shows a fairly high accuracy of prediction.
Far far less than half of companies succeed. So identifying successful companies by random draw is not equivalent to a coin toss. In the case of this study, its 10%.
55% on A-rated companies is way better than the "coin-toss" model of randomly assigning a rating to each company, because there are more than two ratings.
