A career in technology market analysis
Wednesday, August 17, 2022 at 4:06PM John Lively reflects on a 30-year career.
It was a typical workday in 1989, sitting through a meeting announcing the restructuring of Corning's planar coupler business.
The speaker's final words were, "Lively, you'll be doing forecasting." It changed my life and set my career path for the next 30-plus years.
John Lively, principal analyst at market research firm, LightCounting.
No one grows up with a desire to be a market analyst. Indeed, I didn't ask for the job. What made it possible was an IBM PC and LOTUS 1-2-3 in my marine biology lab in the early 1980s (a story for another time).
After a stop at MIT for an MBA, this led to a job in Corning's fledgling PC support team in 1985. Then it was Corning's optical fibre business cost-modelling fibre-to-the-home networks on a PC, working with Bellcore and General Instrument engineers. From there, it was to forecast market demand for planar couplers in the FTTH market.
In the following decade, I had various market forecasting roles within Corning's optical fibre and photonics businesses.
Each time I tried to put forecasting behind me by taking a marketing or product management job, management said they needed me to return to forecasting due to some crisis or another (thank you, Bernie Ebbers).
In 1999, I had an epiphany. If Corning thinks I'm better at forecasting than anything else, perhaps I should become a professional forecaster in a company whose product is forecasts.
