“The great smartphone boom is about to end. That’s according to one savvy tech prognosticator, Bill Whyman, head of the investment research firm International Strategy & Investment‘s tech strategy research team, who tends to look more than a couple quarters ahead,” Robert Hof reports for Forbes.
“Whyman contends that as smartphone penetration reaches 50% sometime next year, the market will start to slow for the first time,” Hof reports. “That will put pressure on all the players, from struggling RIM to to Google‘s newly acquired Motorola and even to so-not-struggling Apple.”
Assuming Whyman’s right, here’s what he thinks happens next:
• Growth slows
• Competition intensifies
• Content and services will be where growth and market value happens
• Wireless carriers try to capture more mobile revenues
• Open systems will start to win because:
1) Consumers become more willing to manage complexity/want choice
2) performance advantage from end-to-end vendor narrows
3) scale and standards of open ecosystem drive lower cost
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Just like it happened in the Portable Media Player (iPod) market, right Billy?
Oops.
For his fifth bullet point, Whyman has been iCal’ed for future use.