JupiterResearch Blogs: Read 'em and Applaud

While I'll bet I'd love working for JupiterResearch (they played a prominent role in the build-up to the dot.com to dot.bomb crash by painting the rosiest pictures of various dot.com companies and industries, and then took a shellacking as the start-ups "monetized" their investors' money with really cool office spaces and toys....but not many successful companies*), sometimes it feels like shooting fish in a barrel when I see summaries of their research reports. But I give them all the credit in the world for maintaining blogs of their analysts' thoughts on various topics, free for the reading. Cheers to Jupiter for doing this!

You may review their blogs at weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/. I have been discouraged as an academic not to have access to the proprietary research of the Jupiters of the world because it retards our (academics') ability to grow new knowledge. I personally believe I would be a better teacher and researcher if I had the chance to review these market research studies (no, we professors don't have tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting around to purchase these reports).

Oh, I have to point out that academia is seen as generally a provider of "basic" or theoretical research while commercial research firms are expected to produce "applied research" such as those produced by JupiterResearch. I have been and remain a pragmatist, so I see value in the applied research that's too often not even on the radar of those of us in academic following parallel research paths. Oh, it's not a two-way street. When academics publish, the whole point is to make the research available to the world at large in hopes ofadvancing knowledge. I think medical research may be the easiest to understand (new treatments for diseases, problems with medications on the market such as Vioxx which was linked to heart attacks and strokes.

So, I hope I can be friends with my commercial brethren (in fact, I'm counting on it). The good ones will welcome outsider critiques, and the best ones will ask me to review their reports before, during or after the release of proprietary research reports. Why? My previous post finds not an overly optimistic, revolutionary report, but one I find extremely conservative. As I tell my students, today is Wednesday, July 26, 2006; let's meet in July 2011 and see who was right.

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*See the highly acclaimed documentary, Stasrtup.com, if you don't believe me.

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You may use this content (better still, argue with me!), but please cite my ideas as © 2006, Dr. Bruce Klopfenstein. Find any typos! Don't smite me, let me know!