With all due respect I think you miss the point of punditry. The point of good punditry is not to convince someone you are right and have them follow you blind

With all due respect I think you miss the point of punditry. The point of good punditry is not to convince someone you are right and have them follow you blindly. It’s to take an insight that you have and transfer that insight to other people by explaining the thought process that led you to that insight. In doing that a good pundit expects the people who receive their insight to then evaluate it on an on-going basis and those people need to use their own knowledge to judge the original insight’s accuracy. So it isn’t about having the reader say “that guy is right” as much as it’s giving the reader something to think about. To use this as an example I think this guy was right when he wrote the piece. He had no way of foreseeing the iPod/iPhone/iPad and their halo effect. But as a reader in 2001 people should have taken this piece with all the negatives it lists and weighed it against Apple’s strengthening product line. Then used all that knowledge to form a new opinion based on it.