You might even say that it’s plausible that the person who’ll be elected president in 2016 isn’t even on anyone’s radar screen at the moment.
You’d probably mention that politicians’ stock can fluctuate quickly and wildly for completely unforeseen reasons.
If a political pundit informed you that the Democratic ticket of Hillary Clinton and Andrew Cuomo would take the White House in 2016, beating the Republican duo of Chris Christie and Marco Rubio by 56.9 percent to 43.1 percent, you’d point out that we don’t even know which party will win the 2012 election. Without that knowledge, it’s impossible to have an informed opinion about how they’ll fare. We don’t know a thing about what any of these operating systems will be like in a few years. What remains to be seen is how these different operating systems – as well as others – will define and shape the user experience beyond what we see today in order to attract new customers and encourage replacements.”
“Android will maintain leadership throughout our forecast, while others will gain more mobile operator partnerships (Apple) or currently find themselves in the midst of a major transition (BlackBerry and Windows Phone/Windows Mobile). “Underpinning the smartphone market is the constantly shifting OS landscape,” added Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst with IDC’s Mobile Phone Technology and Trends team. Oddly enough, IDC’s press release on its new forecast includes a quote from an analyst who does a good job of explaining why it’s so tough to have a sense of where the market is going: In this category, at least: If we were talking about something more stable, such as desktop PCs, it might be a different matter.
I don’t mean to bash IDC (which, full disclosure, is a division of IDG, my former employer). Other research companies such as iSuppli perform similar research, and I find their attempts just as pointless and just as likely to be wildly inaccurate in the long run. It believes that Windows Phone will boom over the next few years even though its actual numbers don’t show it happening yet.It seems to assume slow erosion for BlackBerry OS, but its actual numbers show rapid shrinkage.IDC keeps expecting iOS to start to decline–but instead, it’s still growing.Now it’s forecasting that Andr0id has peaked.