A friend of mine ran a team at a financial institution that did stuff like this every day. For instance, looking for sequential transaction numbers on large e-commerce sites to estimate sales.

This particular bit of research sounds like it then could be used (in conjunction with some ongoing data-gathering) to predict sales / units manufactured in advance of Microsoft's quarterly reports.

That type of information is very valuable to the right parties, which is why my friend's team was quite highly paid.