Seems rather bizarre for him to go back 10 years when Netscape creamed Internet Explorer in terms of user-base. Wasn't it only later that they decided to bundle IE with Windows for free (version 3?), and therefore dominate the market by default?
I think it's fairly clear, in economic terms, what Microsoft has aimed to do with Internet Explorer 7. It simply needs to place itself in a position where it can maintain a sizable majority of users. It doesn't have to produce the best, fastest, smartest, standards-compliant browser, it simply has to produce something which isn't a major bug-fest and security nightmare - if it can achieve this, user inertia will ensure it succeeds.
I think you're being rather harsh about methodologies to judge experts -- using any kind of statistical technique to do so will only weed out "non-experts" through outright rejection, whereas anyone passing the test at any point in time might just have been "lucky" and therefore may or may not be an expert. As we can't play this "guess the expert" game over an infinite timeframe, no one can be proved to be an expert with an absolute degree of certainty.
While I agree with some earlier posters' views that many financial "experts" are merely self-promoting know-nothings (and indeed produce returns inferior to the market), I believe certain people have proved, over the long-term, to have made sufficiently consistent investment decisions to predict future asset prices better than the underlying market itself - a point in case would be Warren Buffett.
If the above is true then it must follow that a panel of experts could indeed outperform, out-think and out-manoeuvre the general public.
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Seems rather bizarre for him to go back 10 years when Netscape creamed Internet Explorer in terms of user-base. Wasn't it only later that they decided to bundle IE with Windows for free (version 3?), and therefore dominate the market by default?
I think it's fairly clear, in economic terms, what Microsoft has aimed to do with Internet Explorer 7. It simply needs to place itself in a position where it can maintain a sizable majority of users. It doesn't have to produce the best, fastest, smartest, standards-compliant browser, it simply has to produce something which isn't a major bug-fest and security nightmare - if it can achieve this, user inertia will ensure it succeeds.
I think you're being rather harsh about methodologies to judge experts -- using any kind of statistical technique to do so will only weed out "non-experts" through outright rejection, whereas anyone passing the test at any point in time might just have been "lucky" and therefore may or may not be an expert. As we can't play this "guess the expert" game over an infinite timeframe, no one can be proved to be an expert with an absolute degree of certainty.
While I agree with some earlier posters' views that many financial "experts" are merely self-promoting know-nothings (and indeed produce returns inferior to the market), I believe certain people have proved, over the long-term, to have made sufficiently consistent investment decisions to predict future asset prices better than the underlying market itself - a point in case would be Warren Buffett.
If the above is true then it must follow that a panel of experts could indeed outperform, out-think and out-manoeuvre the general public.