Re:That's funny (Score 1)

McKinsey, who are about the smartest and best consultants in the world made a prediction for the number of cell phones that would be in the world by 2000 in 1990. They were out by a few orders of magnitude.

Do you have a citation for that? It's hard to imagine how anyone could be off by "a few orders of magnitude" (that's a factor of 1000 or more) on a ten-year prediction for cell phone usage. There are around a billion cell phones in use today. To be off by "a few orders of magnitude," you'd have to have predicted a trillion lines (150 per human being) or a million lines (80% fewer than there were in the U.S. alone in 1990).

Analysts are often wrong, particularly when predicting from early in a product's growth cycle (e.g., digital music players today), but I can't imagine they're often off by a thousandfold.