They also said something like that in their late 1995 forecast, at which time, they expected to snatch the $300B gold ring by 2000! Vaulting off the estimated $145B market size

for that cyclical-peak 1995 year, "Semiconductor Industry Faces 5 years of Boring Growth, to Reach $300B in 2000." Well, not exactly. The industry shrank for three years through 1998 ("1998 was a very bad year."), grew back to $205B in 2001, retreated to $139B in 2001 (!!), and has since climbed to about $250B in 2007. Closer to $300B, but not there yet. And, leading to 2007 with six years of growth without a collapse in prices and overall sales, someone might be nervous about where the industry is headed, and how long it can grow before it faces some kind of retreat.

See the history lesson, below:

All that being said, we all make mistakes. As I recall, one Dataquest analyst (c'est moi) said in late 1984, that the 256K DRAM ASP for 1985 would be more than $10, and was roundly booed by the industry for being too aggressive in his pricing decline estimates. It came in about $3.30 for the year; we were all wrong...very wrong. The DRAM industry took a major bath of red ink, and Inmos, Intel, National, Mostek, ITT, Fairchild (!) and some lesser Japanese suppliers, all finally pulled the plug on DRAMs, though only Mostek and perhaps Intel were significant DRAM players at that time; the others were only dabblers.