Analyst firms are often accused of pulling figures from various places; the sky, their rear ends – basically anywhere but reality – and with the latest numbers from IDC its not difficult to see why.
The firm has released forecasts for the next 4 years of mobile OS market share, and while some of the predictions seem to be more or less on the money, their call on Windows Phone 7 has certainly raised some eyebrows. IDC believe that iPhone market share will shrink to 16.9% in 2015, from 18.2% this year, meanwhile Windows Phone 7 will grow from 3.8% in 2011 to a whopping 20.3% in 2015.
IDC is pinning this surge in shipments on Microsoft’s partnership with Nokia, which will see the Finnish manufacturer abandoning MeeGo and adopting WP7 as its flagship smartphone OS, with the first handsets due to launch this year.
Other figures from the report are less hair-raising. IDC predict Android will grow from a 38.9% share to 43.8%, Blackberry will continue to slide, dropping one percent to a share of 13.2%, and Symbian will continue to haemorrhage popularity, ending 2015 with just 0.1% market share.
An explosion of WP7 growth seems somewhat unlikely given the lukewarm reception the OS has received at retail. Estimates for Q1 2011 shipments range between 2 and 2.5 million – compared to 21 million iPhones and a similar number of Android devices. Although the popularity of iOS appears to be on the wane slightly, the popularity of WP7 doesn’t seem to be accelerating at anything close to the rate needed for the 82.3% annual growth rate hypothesised by IDC.
