Welcome & What To Make Of IDC’s Smartphone Numbers

Welcome to Windows 7 Trender your new blog – and mine – about all things Windows 7. We will tend to write more about business/marketing stuff than deep technical stuff, but feel free to bring any Windows 7 subject you would like to this forum. We start with a somewhat skeptical look at some interesting and perhaps controversial research that came out this week. The research firm IDC predicts that Windows 7 will reach second place in the smartphone market by 2015, achieving a market share of 20.9 percent and also surpassing both RIM and Apple. Being a Windows 7 blogger we would certainly be happy to see those types of adoption rates, but we have a bit of a hard time understanding how to trust bold predictions in a market as dynamic and fast changing as smartphones.

In this market, there are so many variables: Which service provider aligns or re-aligns with which vendor? What features will customers actually be demanding four years from now? Where will the most interesting applications reside and what will be the impetus – marketing, technology, apps – that will create the groundswell of support for any of the various platforms, let alone the ones that will drive Windows 7 into a second place market share?  Is Nokia enough alone to drive Windows 7 adoption so aggressively? If you have answers to any of these questions, please share them. In the meantime, I ask this question: Four years from now, if Windows 7 is in first place in market share or second or third or fourth, will anybody besides the researchers at IDC really care what was said in the first quarter of 2011? As you ponder these and other existential questions, take a look at the IDC numbers below: