

I'm sorry, nobody has a clue what smartphone market share will be in 2016. - technologizer
http://techland.time.com/2012/06/07/lets-just-say-it-nobody-has-a-clue-what-smartphone-market-share-will-be-in-2016/

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stephengillie
We know one thing for sure: We'll have more tablets and phones around, and
more in-betweens like the Rasberry Pi, Cotton Candy, and others. TVs and
monitors will ship with clones of those built-in.

By 2016, "smartphone" will be a small part of the embedded processor / ARM
marketshare, which is what we'll actually be concerned with.

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xiaoma
That was a wonderful graph. It took me a moment to figure out how to read it
since the year numbers at the bottom were below the fold, but it captures the
horrible quality of the predictions perfectly.

Just mentally drawing a line from the android 2010 starting point to the 2011
starting point (to get the true growth) and comparing the slope with that
measly little increase they predicted in their 2010 line nearly made me laugh.
Seeing the same mistake virtually replicated going from 2011 to 2012 did.

This is one of those examples where the proverbial monkey's throwing at a
prediction dartboard would have been more accurate.

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hemancuso
If IDC could predict such things with any degree of accuracy they would make a
lot more money selling the research to hedge funds rather than media shills.

The fact that they don't validates the degree to which these reports are just
idle speculation.

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jere
Well, sure. If you had made predictions about the smartphone market 4 years
ago (before the first commercial Android phones) or 5 years ago (before iPhone
was released), your predictions would be utterly and hopelessly wrong.

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MiguelHudnandez
When everyone buys a new phone roughly every two years, I can't imagine how
accurate a 3 1/2-year prediction could be.

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mtgx
I agree. IDC, especially, has had more misses than hits. If they are so good
at predicting this stuff, why aren't they doing predictions for next year?
Shouldn't that be easier? I think they don't do it that way because that's too
easy to check and call them out for it, compared to calling them out in 2016
for the prediction they are making now.

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Toshio
Using advanced game theory, and based on what the Metro interface looks like
right now, and how it evolved in the past 12 months, I can accurately predict
that winpho's marketshare in 2016 will be exactly what it is today.

