“IDC caused some chuckles to break out across the tech world when they predicted that Microsoft’s Windows phones will beat the iPhone in market share by 2015. Impossible! Absurd! seemed to be the default responses,” Jon Brodkin reports for Network World. “But is it really so far-fetched? Gartner, the other giant tech analyst firm, now agrees with IDC in a new report that says Windows phones will take 19.5% market share by 2015, compared to 17.2% for Apple’s iOS.”
“While it’s tough to predict outcomes in such a volatile market four years in advance, there are plausible scenarios under which Microsoft can topple Apple in market share,” Brodkin reports. “To do so, Microsoft must position Windows Phone 7 as a low-end smartphone, almost like a high-end ‘dumb’ phone, while Apple continues going after the highest, most expensive end of the mobile market. If your phone can check email, surf the Web, and play music and videos it already does most of what a typical iPhone owner uses the device for. And if it’s free, rather than $200 to $300, many people will take it.”
“The other factor working in Microsoft’s favor, of course, is the Nokia deal. Because of its dominant position outside the United States, Nokia still sells more smartphones than Apple,” Brodkin reports. “Today, those phones are Symbian-based, but they will be transitioned to Windows Phone 7 as fast as Microsoft and Nokia can make it happen.”
Brodkin reports, “There have been some reports that Apple will develop a cheaper, smaller version of the iPhone to go after the low end of the market, but that still remains to be seen. 2015 is a long way away in the mobile market, but the combination of Nokia’s existing market share and a Microsoft strategy to target the low end of the smartphone market could well be enough to drive Microsoft sales ahead of the iPhone.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yippie. Did IDC and/or Gartner predict the state of the 2010 smartphone market back in 2006? Even though we’d love to see those, we can’t find 2006 predictions from either company, so maybe they were much, much smarter back then.
If (big if) this happens, do we also get several years of idiotic articles exhorting Apple to make cheap phones, just like we had, and still have, to endure from the “cheap Mac” brigade? Revenue share is what matters most, not market share.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
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