Market Prediction of Schedule Dates

Mark Hedlund of O'Reilly recalls the great story I heard once before of a Microsoft team that used an anonymous trading market to predict the release date of the product.

I tentatively tried suggesting this once to my project team and was laughed out of the conference room. But I do wish we would do this more, I think it would give our release dates a lot more predictability and reliability, and management could plan much better.

It's funny how sometimes people think you're joking when you're serious...