The job of an Analyst.

Carl Manneh, CEO of Mojang, replied to my tweet plugging this blog post.  I was in gamer/business nerdvanah.


Jspringfield211: @notch @carlmanneh Mojang Forecast, just for fun.blog.zorts.net/2011/06/minecr…
Carlmanneh: It sure is. Nice post, but I think your evaluation is a bit modest ;)


The strategy of being a business analyst is that you provide data based on calculations and reasonable expectations.  Did I undershoot the number?  Absolutely.  Because the numbers I generated are not for investors, they are internal business numbers.  There is a big difference between a number generated for internal use and a number generated for external use.  If I were making such predictions because the marketing department wanted to know its budget for the next three years, I would want to undershoot the number as well.  "Worst case scenario you have x% of this projected budget to sell ads with next year."


What I did wrong in that post was state "Were Mojang Specifications to do an IPO they could be worth as much as 50 - 70 million Euro" without the qualification that the numbers were internal.  To the untrained eye it might look like I was forecasting for a different group of people then I actually was.  Or forecasting as an investor, which I was not.  I was pretending to be an employee of Mojang.


Minecraft has no reason to EVER do an IPO and never should.  Becoming a public company fundamentally changes a company in unpredictable ways (And I don't even know the difference between a Swedish IPO and an American one).  The culture of the Mojang would be altered in a bad way.  At the moment they can take advice from fans or not as they see fit.  Pistons for example.  They are free to add or not add anything based on what they feel Minecraft is about.  In a public company situation they might feel pressure to add a 'feature' simply because the shareholders wanted it.  Or because the customers wanted it.  Even if it goes against the spirit of the game.


And besides, if things are going we well as Carl indicates...  They really don't stand to gain that much more money than they already have from an IPO.  ;)