Technology is advancing at an ever increasing rate, and yet some market research firms still believe that they can provide insight into how the technology market will look in five years time. The problem is…they can’t.
The most recent example is a firm called Strategy Analytics, which is claiming that they can predict that the iPad and iPad Mini will mean the the Apple/iTunes ecosystem will be the “premier destination” for tablet downloads through to 2017. How have they worked that out? Seeing Apple’s current dominance and looking for headlines.
In its Mobile Apps Download Forecast: 2008 – 2017 report, Strategy Analytics forecasts a total of more than 350 billion smartphone and tablet app downloads between 2008 and 2017 with Apple maintaining a 56% market share for tablet apps by 2017.
For this prediction, Strategy Analytics appears to have completely ignored that the iPad Mini will likely cannibalize iPad market share, and the flood of Android tablets have already started to eat into Apple’s lead, with Apple only being able to hold onto 50% tablet market share in Q3 of this year with strong competition from the competitively priced Amazon’s Kindle Fire and the Google Nexus tablets.
It is true that there are currently notably more tablet apps for iPads than Android (or Windows 8), but this is simply because up until now Apple has had such a dominance in the market that developers rarely saw the benefit of tablet apps for other platforms. Now, however, that has changed and the rapid rise of the Android tablet means that we should see much more impressive Android tablet apps in the very near future.
Could Apple turn the decline around and keep its dominance for the next five years? Could Android stumble and lose its way? Could Windows 8 or Blackberry 10 change the game? Absolutely. But claiming you know five years from now is just a lie.