Gartner Tablet Sales Forecast: On Target or Pure Fiction?
Gartner has released a new worldwide tablet sales forecast, covering 2012 through 2016. But… Can you really trust a Gartner forecast for a bunch of products that don’t exist (example: Windows 8 tablets) and a product family whose future is at risk (example: RIM QNX). Here’s the tablet spin from The VAR Guy.
According to Gartner, worldwide tablet sales will grow from 119 million units in 2012 to 369 million units in 2016. Gartner also offers tablet market share predictions for Apple iOS (the iPad operating system), Google Android, Microsoft and QNX during the forecast period.
But are the numbers reliable educated guesses — or pure fiction? Consider this history lesson: Anybody else remember when Gartner predicted netbook sales would skyrocket from 5.2 million units in 2008 to 50 million netbooks by 2012. But by June 2011, Netbook sales had crashed about 40 percent because users found them underpowered and millions of customers opted instead for tablets.
The upshot: Gartner completely misread the netbook market and failed to spot a disruptive technology — tablets — that would reshape the market.
Fast forward to the present. Will Gartner’s new tablet forecast hold true from 2012 through 2016? Hmmm… By 2016, Gartner predicts:
- Apple iOS will ship 169.6 million units annually.
- Android tablets will ship 137.6 million units annually, but that’s essentially a worthless prediction without knowing which PC and mobile vendors will actually have successful Android tablets. Any educated guesses here?
- Windows 8 tablets will ship 43.6 million units annually, but here again it’s impossible to say which hardware companies will have truly successful Windows 8 tablets. Again, any educated guesses here?
- QNX tablets will ship 17.8 million units annually, but that forecast is worthless considering QNX owner RIM (Research In Motion) is in a freefall and considering strategic options for the company.
The bottom line from The VAR Guy: In some ways, Gartner is telling us what we already know — Apple iOS is dominating and Google Android is promising for tablets, while Windows 8 will need to be a rock-solid offering to gain tablet momentum.
It’s a pretty safe bet that the tablet market will continue to grow. VAR and MSPs will need to develop mobile device management strategies. But predicting 2016 market share figures for each tablet operating system seems like a stretch to The vAR Guy.
Skeptical? Check back with The VAR Guy in 2016 to see how well those Gartner predictions worked out.
If I had my dog crap on the floor and use the positioning to determiner future market directions, id have about as much chance of being right .
The great thing is that when theyre wrong, it doesnt affect their credibility one bit. Its like being a weatherman really.
Here is a good one from last year about their divinely inspired-analysis:
Windows Phone 7 Will Overtake iOS by 2015, Says Gartner
April 7, 2011
http://allthingsd.com/20110407/windows-phone-7-will-overtake-ios-by-2015-says-gartner/
Still, nothing beats Gartner when they were flogging the Zune.
Like I said, they have a great racket in where being wrong is no problem whatsoever.
gt; predicted netbook sales
Netbooks were originally cheap devices using DVD player screens, flash storage and running Linux. MS used its OEM contracts and re-released XP to force the manufacturers to build them with Windows XP. They needed more RAM, hard disks and bigger screens to run XP and this made them no longer cheap netbooks but small laptops with no benefit and little price advantage over a full laptop.
This suited MS as it killed off Linux in that market.
The only thing a iPad has over a netbook are GPS related apps. My Dell Mini can do anything an iPad can do and much more. At half the price. More memory, more storage, far more connectivity. With 2gb ram I run Windows 7 and any software I want. With Google Chrome apps or Jolicloud I also can have most of the popular tablet apps.
I guess I forgot one other thing the iPad has. Sexy! Is that worth the extra cost? Apparently.
I wrongly assumed that it was in the US at first.
To discover it was here in the UK is quite saddening.