Ever wonder why two market research groups can study the same field — say, the market for mass spectrometers in life science — and come up not only with vastly divergent predictions of how much it will be worth in five or 10 years, but also wildly different valuations of the market as it stands right now? Research Analyst A might say (with certainty) that this market will be worth $4.9 billion in 2010. Two days later, there’s always a Research Analyst B who issues a similar report pegging the same market value at, say, $500 million.
In the interest of bringing some of the values that have been so important to the systems biology community — namely, high-throughput performance and open access for everyone — Genome Technology introduces the Random Market Forecast Generator. Now you can feed in basic information, press a button, and (voilà!) get a market prediction of your very own. You can thank us later for all the time you’ll save not having to slog through all those “official” research reports.