Being able to judge where the mobile market is going to be in 4 years time is just not possible in my book. This is an industry that moves quickly and sees manufacturers rise and fall with speed. Take HTC as an example, or Motorola, or Nokia. If everything else remains the same then sure, you can do a good bit of guesswork, but everything else never remains the same in the world of smartphones.
Today IDC have published their latest Quarterly Mobile Phone tracker and it’s not good news for Microsoft. The company states that the new Windows 10 mobile OS really won’t make any impact, and their current 2.2% share will only rise by a paltry 0.1% to 2.3% in 2019.
This data, though, comes from the analysts who predicted that Microsoft would have a huge 20.3% market share by now, instead of the actual 2.2%. I dread to think how many business decisions were made based on those earlier figures. Although they couldn’t have foreseen the Nokia buy-out not really producing huge results, it’s the sheer fact that so many other variables can affect these figures that makes them unreliable.
Anyway. IDC pretty much tells Microsoft to give up on the mobile space…
Despite all the effort Microsoft has put into the launch of Windows 10, IDC does not expect Microsoft’s share of the smartphone OS market to grow much over the coming years.
The firm also highlights the fact that few manufacturers are bringing phones to market which are powered by a Microsoft OS.