I'm sorry, nobody has a clue what smartphone market share will be in 2016.

We know one thing for sure: We'll have more tablets and phones around, and more in-betweens like the Rasberry Pi, Cotton Candy, and others. TVs and monitors will ship with clones of those built-in.<p>By 2016, "smartphone" will be a small part of the embedded processor / ARM marketshare, which is what we'll actually be concerned with.

That was a wonderful graph. It took me a moment to figure out how to read it since the year numbers at the bottom were below the fold, but it captures the horrible quality of the predictions perfectly.<p>Just mentally drawing a line from the android 2010 starting point to the 2011 starting point (to get the true growth) and comparing the slope with that measly little increase they predicted in their 2010 line nearly made me laugh. Seeing the same mistake virtually replicated going from 2011 to 2012 did.<p>This is one of those examples where the proverbial monkey's throwing at a prediction dartboard would have been more accurate.

If IDC could predict such things with any degree of accuracy they would make a lot more money selling the research to hedge funds rather than media shills.<p>The fact that they don't validates the degree to which these reports are just idle speculation.

Well, sure. If you had made predictions about the smartphone market 4 years ago (before the first commercial Android phones) or 5 years ago (before iPhone was released), your predictions would be utterly and hopelessly wrong.

When everyone buys a new phone roughly every two years, I can't imagine how accurate a 3 1/2-year prediction could be.

I agree. IDC, especially, has had more misses than hits. If they are so good at predicting this stuff, why aren't they doing predictions for next year? Shouldn't that be easier? I think they don't do it that way because that's too easy to check and call them out for it, compared to calling them out in 2016 for the prediction they are making now.

Using advanced game theory, and based on what the Metro interface looks like right now, and how it evolved in the past 12 months, I can accurately predict that winpho's marketshare in 2016 will be exactly what it is today.