Henry Blodget (of “iPhone dead in the water” fame) may want to look into what wine goes with crow, because according to Gartner, Android’s market share has stalled.
Before you iPhone boosters get all excited (the Macalope knows how fanatical and craaazy you Apple worshippers are), the iPhone has also stalled. Did the whole cell phone industry just take April off or something?
Or maybe we’ve reached equilibrium. Heck if the Macalope knows. His expectation was that Android’s meteoric growth was too much to sustain, and that it would at least start to slow down, but he didn’t expect the timing to be so delicious. Because apparently right after Blodget opened his mouth about how Android was your new boyfriend, its market-share growth decided to stop showing up for work. Blodget is apparently the opposite of The Lathe of Heaven (The Lathe of Heck?).
This is the Macalope’s point, though: Predicting this stuff is hard. Things are in in constant flux, and you never know what unexpected event is going to shape the future.
You don’t need to look any further than Gartner itself. Just two years ago the company predicted that, by 2012, Android would be second behind Symbian—a distant second at that, with less than half of Symbian’s market share—and the iPhone would be third. We’re not even halfway through 2011 and Android’s already ahead of Symbian, which Nokia is ditching for Windows Phone 7. Now Gartner predicts that by 2015 Android will be first, followed by Windows Phone 7 and then the iPhone.
Apparently Gartner feels fine predicting any ol’ thing, as long as Apple’s third.
Personally, the horny one thinks the company’s being overconfident about how easily Nokia’s going to yank the old rug out from under its users and slide in a new one, but he’s not going to say Gartner’s wrong. He is, however, going to link to the time the company said Apple should get out of the hardware business. Because that will never stop being funny.
Getting back to Blodget, though, it’s easy to be wrong about this stuff, so the best way to avoid looking like a complete jerk is not to proclaim with certainty that you know how things are going to turn out.
Blodget, however, seems to be trying to be a complete jerk, so that’s more of a feature than a bug for him.
[Editors’ Note: In addition to being a mythical beast, the Macalope is not an employee of Macworld. As a result, the Macalope is always free to criticize any media organization. Even ours.]