Steve Jobs | “people don’t know what they want”

Professor Mersey’s words were powerful and I shall review the videos again. To your comment “the more you learn about your target audience/market, their needs, wants and behaviors”, I think the market is so complex and so noisy that this is becoming more and more of a specialized scientific task. A McKinsey report titled “Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity” posits some big claims for its potential:

• “we estimate that a retailer using big data to the full has the potential to increase its operating margin by more than 60 percent”.

I understand there is a significant skills shortage—McKinsey estimates that:

•  “by 2018, the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions.”

Wow!

To your point about Content Shock, it is a compelling theory and I will take a look at that article—thanks. I stumbled upon a similar article that analyses the economic impact of Content Shock and posted in a wk 1 thread.