Juniper slashes NFC retail forecast by $70bn

Interesting first paragraph. Whilst it is unsurprising that Juniper should want to blame apple for messing up their projections, shouldn't someone be pointing out that analysts are supposed to understand and observe the market, and that in this case they seem to have failed to have done either.

Although it is 'unlucky' for them that they happened to offer their NFC guesstimates 6 weeks before the iPhone 5 announcement, it was pretty obvious that Apple were/are not in the business of making a marketplace for their competitors disproportionate benefit, and weren't going to jump all over NFC because their is an obvious mismatch in the maturation of NFC opportunities within their primary geo and market sector strongholds, and vice-versa. (There are some other obvious aspects relating to the degree of control to which Apple would be able to have over a rampant NFC domain, and the potential downside - for them - of potentially letting the access providers re-invigorate their waning control of the telco value chain, but I'll let that pass for now...)

Sadly, both analysts and credit rating agencies have increasingly taken on the role of the tails that wag the dogs, to the detriment of value generation, and ultimately of customer benefit.

Btw, NFC is clearly going to happen, but not until a number of technological, strategic and marketplace realignments have come to pass. It would be nice if in this instance someone could have just stood up and said 'we got it wrong'.