What is the value of the metric? And what metric? App submissions per unit time? I suppose that metric has some value. The projected date that the Google app st

What is the value of the metric? And what metric? App submissions per unit time? I suppose that metric has some value. The projected date that the Google app store will have more apps than Apple's iOS app store is not a metric: it's a naive extrapolation. What value do research firms deliver? For whom? In the past, many people have accused various research firms of shilling for various industry players, e.g. Gartner for Microsoft. I've never heard of a research firm providing insightful, actionable, accurate, non-trivial analysis. ("Sun will rise tomorrow!") The only people who I know of who cite research firms' reports are people in large corporations who are out of touch with reality or sales people or people at companies that have an interest in having others believe what a research firm is saying. Market research can be scientific in that it can reflect a basic intellectual honesty and be the result of critical reflecting on findings and asking whether they make even the least amount of sense. When people use the term "scientific" the way you did, it often appears to be a defensive move, a way to say, "Of course this isn't a repeatable double-blind controlled clinical trial!" But there's much more to science than that. Most of what we know we know through the application of scientific methods (perhaps better-called habits of mind) in situations where gold-plated studies are impractical or impossible. --- ADDENDUM I am being harsh because research firms contribute little or no value. They're little better than web content farms in terms of the volume and value of information they produce. They feed pointless speculation. They flatten complex issues into simple-minded horse races. I am far more supportive of people doing real work that turns out to be spectacularly wrong. Research firms produce thick, black, sooty smoke that pollutes the marketplace, both the literal marketplace and the marketplace of ideas.