[ShabbyDoo]

My MBA is circa 1997, and I shared your experience. A friend with a much "better" MBA than me (his from Harvard) once remarked, "Modeling is a great way to determine if a business idea is awful, but it's not going to tell you if you have a good one." I might argue even further that modeling can lead one to dismiss profound ideas through the erroneous presumption of a static future. It was said that the original business justification for Xerox counted the number of typists in America and multiplied by the number of mimeograph copies produced from each document. Obviously, the copy machine found many more purposes once introduced into offices -- a much more dynamic effect than most could even imagine.

Perhaps Dell's artificially static future was the presumption that shipping a laptop or desktop with a pre-installed OS would continue to be a viable business model? What if Steve Jobs had been forced at gunpoint fifteen years ago to lead Dell? What would the outcome have been? He likely would have spoken harshly about the elephant in the room -- Dell produces a commodity, and its future depends on Microsoft's continued prowess. With such an admission out in the open, what actions could have been taken which would have been nearly impossible to quantify via traditional B-School modeling techniques?

[eftpotrm]

What if Steve Jobs had been forced at gunpoint fifteen years ago to lead Dell? What would the outcome have been? He likely would have spoken harshly about the elephant in the room -- Dell produces a commodity, and its future depends on Microsoft's continued prowess.

What if Michael Dell had been forced at gunpoint fifteen years ago to lead Apple (and not liquidate it)? What would the outcome have been? He likely would have spoken harshly about the elephant in the room -- Apple produces bespoke designs to compete against commodities with bigger economies of scale and network effects, and its future depends on its (arguably not then demonstrated) ability to, by itself, out innovate both a larger software provider and several hundred hardware vendors.

(Which is a slightly artificial way to make the point, but I don't for one minute think Apple's past - or indeed future - success was even slightly guaranteed. Their position is remarkably precarious, IMHO.)

[glimcat]

That's pretty much the rule for modeling in any domain. It can tell you with good confidence if an idea is bad and with fair confidence whether an idea might be viable, but it can't do more than guess and it won't tell you whether you're asking a stupid question.