Harry McCracken: IDC smartphone predictions useless.

This was McCracken me up.  It's true: IDC's got no idea what is supposed to happen in the future.  To prove the point, Harry McCracken overlaid IDC's past predictions of market share growth in smartphones.  But he lets IDC off the hook in the end.

So I borrowed McCracken's overlay by overlaying my own diagram over his.  By tracking the starting points of IDC's annual predictions, you begin to get a sense of how much they've had to adjust their projections.

What's amusing is, that IDC continues to try to predict what's going to happen, feeding the fanbois.  Rather than just feed good data like comScore does, IDC wants to gather some data and then throw out some wild predictions.  Now, they're saying that Windows will overtake iOS for second place, behind Android, and that Android has already peaked.

Unlikely.  For all that money that Microsoft and Nokia have spent so far, WP has barely budged upward.  More than six months after the fruits of their labor began to show, it's hard to tell if Nokia's growing market share for WP, or if they're just cannibalizing other WP manufacturers' sales.

It seems like a stretch of the imagination that WP will grow dramatically with Android dropping.  Maybe that happens, but instead I think Android's going to fragment more, and that's a good thing.  More companies will fork their own Android builds as B&N and Amazon have done with their tablet OS.

If open hardware made the IBM PC and DOS the popular format, then it seems quite plausible that open hardware with open software will assume the mantle of the dominant platform of the future.