To be fair, part of the problem is that each of us has been bitten throughout his career by issues which could have been prevented by being able to predict the future. We then move from the truth that if we had known the future, we could have acted better yesterday to the fallacy that today we finally know what we're going to need tomorrow.

This isn't isolated to our industry, of course: a constant refrain is that generals & admirals fight the last war; the financial industry is rife with products which are secure against the last recession, and so forth.