Matthew Yglesias has a short article about how terrible the 2007 predictions of which Smartphones we would be using today. They predicted that Symbian would be the market leader with 40%. This is mostly Noikia (31%). It hasn’t worked out that way. Symbian now has roughly 1% of the market, as you may have noticed that you are not, in fact, using a Noikia smartphone right now.

These experts also thought that Microsoft would have a large share (14%) of the market, but they too are way down (4%). The predictions about RIM were roughly correct.

Given that the predictions about the winners were way off, it should not surprise you that they were also off about the loses. At the time, Apple had 4% of the market. But these guys were no idiots. They predicted that Apple would grow—a lot. They said Apple would currently have 14% of the market. This is less than half of the 32% share that Apple has. This is bad, but it could have been worse. And it was!

In 2007, Google had no market share at all. But they had plans and so the experts predicted that Google would have 6% of the market by now. This is a little low—by a factor of 8.5! Google now has 51% of the market.

And now for my predictions. Oh, never mind!