It’s possible to fit data points to an S-curve without assuming where it flattens out — but then you might not draw the limit as part of your prediction. We don’t want to assume the thing can grow forever; the market saturates somewhere, even if we don’t know where.
Like, if you’re forecasting traffic growth for a web service, you know that there’s a finite amount of human attention that can be spent on looking at web pages. It might be a lot higher than anyone expected, but it’s not infinite.
See for instance Wikipedia’s growth models (sadly not updated since 2015) — they started out with an exponential model and then ended up with Gompertz being much more accurate.
It’s possible to fit data points to an S-curve without assuming where it flattens out — but then you might not draw the limit as part of your prediction. We don’t want to assume the thing can grow forever; the market saturates somewhere, even if we don’t know where.
Like, if you’re forecasting traffic growth for a web service, you know that there’s a finite amount of human attention that can be spent on looking at web pages. It might be a lot higher than anyone expected, but it’s not infinite.
See for instance Wikipedia’s growth models (sadly not updated since 2015) — they started out with an exponential model and then ended up with Gompertz being much more accurate.