Windows Phone won't ever succeed, says IDC Windows Phone won't ever amount to much, suggests analyst house IDC. The company's latest Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone tracker says Microsoft's mobile OS will grab 2.2 per cent market share in 2015 and by 2019 will have added a non-colossal 0.1 per cent more to claim 2.3 per cent of the mobile market. “Despite all the …
The article is four and a half years old, so I guess that, back then, they couldn't have predicted Microsoft's rape and murder of Nokia. I'd imagine that it didn't occur to the analysts that Microsoft would just throw away such a potential advantage.
This is less about the analysts being muppets (though some certainly are), and more about Microsoft insane decisions which have destroyed chances in the mobile market.
"This is less about the analysts being muppets"
Except a prediction that only works "barring unforeseen circumstances" is an utterly useless one - the whole point is unforeseen circumstances are guaranteed to arise in anything but the shortest of terms. Which, basically, implies exactly what has been suggested: the predictions are useless, and those making them are muppets unless they either manage to accurately foresee the unforeseen or admit they cant's actually predict s##t.
To be fair...
Yep, lots of analysts get it wrong, as do stock and weather forecasters (to name a few). They build a bunch of models that they think have a chance of playing out, and call the result based on the data they have available. Its better than saying "we have no fucking idea what the market will look like in a few years, and we cant be arsed trying to figure it out". If anyone is a muppet, it is people that believe the analysts have some kind of crystal ball. There is no news story here, but it does generate a lot of clicks...
"Except a prediction that only works "barring unforeseen circumstances" is an utterly useless one - the whole point is unforeseen circumstances are guaranteed to arise in anything but the shortest of terms."
Except that all you CAN do with a prediction. Unforeseen circumstances are just that: unforeseen. For example: who back in the early oughties could've predicted a device like an iPhone could create a genuine paradigm shift in the mobile phone market, forcing mobile companies (especially western ones) to realize feature phones would become a fading fad? It's like trying to plan for a trip (traffic and all) only to get caught in a sudden earthquake. Some things you just can't plan for because they're beyond million-to-one shots.
Yes, the Itanium forecasts were idiotic. IDC simply disregarded what mildly sane computer veterans have come to understand after all these years. It's not the hardware that sells. It's what you can do with the damned computer that really counts. In a (now modern) word, APPS.
HP backed Itanium as its hope of providing some continuity with its proprietary workstations and servers. Nope! Bad idea. Ditto, DEC Alpha, another proprietary wannabe, for the same reason.
Amusing article.
On a side note, I am so sick of looking at articles like that and having to scan the page back and forth trying to find the sodding publication date. Any web site that publishes "news" articles should be forced to put the date in large friendly letters at the top of page. On pain of having its domain name revoked. With a rusty screwdriver. Slowly.
It is only by looking at the comments (1638 Days Ago) that I can figure it was probably published about four and a half years ago.
I should have been clearer in my rant. I was talking about the article that "Lost all faith..." was referring to:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/230151/idc_windows_phones_to_overtake_iphone_ios_by_2015.html
not The Register's article. The PC World article most definitely does not have the date on the page (I'm on Windows 7 and Firefox 42.0) and unless a date sometime early in 2011 is cleverly encoded into the number 230151, it is not in the URL either.
El Reg articles, on the other hand, are a paragon of clarity and helpfulness. (That's enough grovelling - Ed)
The PC World article most definitely does not have the date on the page
It does transmit the date information to your browser - that article was published on 2011-06-12 (12th of June rather than the 6th of December, judging by other pages). But this seems only to be hidden in the headers.
I guess someone thought that all the site's readers scan it avidly every day, and no-one would ever come in from a search engine...
Vic.
Well, apparently the true nature of the analyst whore business is not too clear? Here is how it works: You pay the analyst whore a lot of money and explain what the conclusion of the "study" should be. Then the analyst whore finds some numbers, statistics and trends that lead to the conclusion desired by the company paying the whore. It's that simple.
So in the referenced PC World article, MICROSOFT paid IDC for the report. In the most recent report, my educated guess would say that one of Apple, Google, Samsung, or Xaomi paid for the wonderful analysis culminating in the low Windows Phone market share.
And, of course, an IDC spokesperson will say that new information came to light between the two reports.
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So i am a fan of Windows Phone (i have it, use it, like it, you may not and that is ok) but i'm really not sure that having Android (or any one system for that matter) with that much of the market is a good thing... it puts a lot of control in that company's hands - does anyone think that is a good idea?
You may not like MS (or Apple or Google for that matter) but surely choice is a good thing?
surely choice is a good thing?
Choice exists, but that doesn't mean people will take it and create diverse and roughly equal ecosystems and markets. So you have IoS, Android (and derivatives like Cyanogenmod), Windows, you have Blackberry, Ubuntu, Firefox. If you search hard enough you might find Tizen, Sailfish and a few others. But the reality is that most people perceive only a choice between Android and Apple.
One of the biggest killers of choice is "free" software. So Microsoft destroyed the browser market by bundling IE "free", with negative consequences still being felt thirty years later. The same vile company did the same thing with its mail client, and again the negative impacts (of lower choice and lower quality in the market) are still seen decades later. The ongoing cr@pness of Android with regard to updates and security is a result of the "free" nature of Android (who will bother to support something they aren't being paid to support?). Adobe Reader, Flash Player, both "free" and infamously cr@p.
At the root of the problem of "free" are three simple issues: 1) that new entrants are unable to create any revenue stream to give them traction thus crushing variety, 2) the lack of successful new entrants reduces pressure on incumbents to innovate and maintain, and 3) the lack of revenue streams from user-choosers reduces the incentive to keep the dominant "free" products secure and up to date.
Unfortunately "free" presses an evolutionary button in most of us, some sort of scavenger instinct that over-rides common sense, and makes us think that we are getting something for nothing. Not sure how you can undo that.
For the average buyer of a mobile phone, Android is not "free". It's not "free" for the phone manufacturer, either. It's certainly "cheap", for manufacturer and buyer, and for the manufacturer it's also customisable. Presumably those are its main advantages.
I agree that there's something wrong with the mobile phone market, but it has nothing to do with "free".
"I think that also explains why Linux (as a desktop OS) is such a steaming pile..."
That sounds like a wail for help from someone who has discovered this weird belly button thing now that MS has cut the umbilical cord.
Bravo for stating your mind plainly.
> One of the biggest killers of choice is "free" software. So Microsoft destroyed the browser market by bundling IE "free", with negative consequences still being felt thirty years later.
It was not that it was 'free', it was that it was bundled and compulsory. Spyglass wrote IE under a contract that paid them a few dollars for every copy sold. MS gave it away for 'free' and that destroyed Spyglass. One question is: does 'bundling' make it 'sold' as part of the product regardless of saying 'free' on the box?
When Win98 was installed the first reboot asked if you wanted to install IE but the 'Cancel' button was disabled. There was no escape, it had to be installed. Prior to IE, OEMs were installing Mozilla and Trumpet or similar. MS gave an additional discount (said to be $5) to _not_ install competitors.
So it wasn't 'free' that destroyed the browser market, it was 'compulsory' and 'OEM discounts'. MS also deliberately added non-standard features to FrontPage and IE so that Mozilla did not display 'properly'.
> Android with regard to updates and security is a result of the "free" nature of Android
There is a core of Android that is free, but if Google services are to be included then there is a charge. Google makes updates and new versions available to all, it is the makers that have to build and issue updates. Choose a vendor that does that.
> At the root of the problem of "free" are three simple issues: 1) that new entrants are unable to create any revenue stream to give them traction thus crushing variety, 2) the lack of successful new entrants reduces pressure on incumbents to innovate and maintain, and 3) the lack of revenue streams from user-choosers reduces the incentive to keep the dominant "free" products secure and up to date.
That is a very shallow analysis. Red Hat (as CentOS or several others) is free, Ubuntu is free, as are many others, yet they have entered the market and created a revenue stream, _and_ they keep the products secure and up to date.
Useful as competition is, you can't force users to accept 2nd rate products based on it. Yes competition would be nice but Microsoft don't have a competitive product and apple aren't even trying to compete for the mass market.
Time to look elsewhere, probably to internal competition in the Android market and that's likely to need a hefty nudge from regulators. Luckily it's now close enough to a monopoly to get that, but regulation still can't force users to say no to Google's desirable products, just open the door to alternatives on Android.
This argument is over, the world chose Android, that's where competition needs to work from now on.
Microsoft don't have a competitive product
With the amount of marketing that Microsoft perform, all they needed was a viable product.
Of course people have a choice. Most people aren't locked in to their phones like they where on the desktop... they've been able to chose what they think is the best based on their own criteria, not because they need to be compatible with the rest of the world; my phone can ring your phone, whatever OS it is running.
Of course people have a choice. Most people aren't locked in to their phones like they where on the desktop... they've been able to chose what they think is the best based on their own criteria, not because they need to be compatible with the rest of the world; my phone can ring your phone, whatever OS it is running
I humbly submit that this is not true: for many users, they feel that they ARE locked into their phones. The issue is not the phone per se but the personal data on that phone; Apple users must sync and back up their data using Apple applications, either iCloud or iTunes, and most Android users use Google cloud services. Once attached to these methods, getting your phone's personal data from one paradigm to the other is deemed, probably by a lot of people, to be a hassle to be avoided, so they stay in their chosen ecosystem.
For example: I, for one, use (the adware infected) MyPhoneExplorer to sync ny Android phones to my PC but, instead of using MPE's built-in database clients, I make MPE sync using Outlook. This grants me a standardized data store to do with as I please (and to keep Google the hell away from my data).. And how many people do this rather than simply using their Google account? Not many, compared to the hundreds of millions of Android users.
I have had to use my wife's iphone and brother's android phone at times. I'd rate both as being inferior in every regard (except the size (although perhaps not the quality) of the app store) to my Q10. However I suspect that lots of people here would disagree with me (I know a lot of people in my office do). One person's second rate is another’s productivity platform.
"Useful as competition is, you can't force users to accept 2nd rate products based on it."
I'd beg to differ - from my experience, most mobile users would choose a second rate free app over a similar app of better quality but that also carried a pricetag...
When Microsoft succeeds in a market they consolidate their success by eliminating choice. So yes, it is a good thing. Look at there all the innovation is in tech these days: where they aren't in control. There are thousands of different mobile device designs. Meanwhile on the shelf at Best Buy is still one choice of laptop OS and all the machines are bulky, low resolution, have four hours of battery life, might as well all be the same brand as if it was still 2005.
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