Windows 8 to grab iPad market share wrested back from Android
Google, watch out for MS not Apple, says analyst
Windows 8 will dent Apple's dominance of the tablet market, but it's biggest impact will be to hold Android's growth back.
So says market watcher Canalys, which reckons some 207m tablets will ship in 2016, around half of them iPads of one size or another. In that year, tablets will account for almost a third of all personal computer shipments.
Android will be found in around 35 per cent of the tablets that ship that year, a share largely unchanged from now.
Preventing the Google OS from grabbing a share from Apple is Windows 8, though it will only have a share of 17 per cent or so by 2016, the researcher believes.
So it'll be Microsoft taking share from Apple, not Google.
Canalys reckons Android can increase its market share, but only if "vendors make radical improvements to the overall user experience". It highlights Amazon's "tight integration of hardware, software and services" in its Kindle Fire family as a case in point. Likewise, though to a lesser extent, what Google is doing with the Nexus 7.
Indeed, because of what Amazon has done, Canalys thinks the online retail giant will be Apple's key competitor.
Geographically, the US is expected to dominate pad shipments, with the volume more than doubling to 88m units in 2016. China is expected to be the second largest country market, with shipments of around 20m. ®
COMMENTS
windows 7 ?
> Preventing the Google OS from grabbing a share from Apple is Windows 7, though it'll only have a share of 17 per > cent or so by 2016, the researcher believes.
Steve B will be livid ... windows 8 was supposed to be the big breakthrough on tablets ... and now those pesky resellers and tablet makers go out and put windows 7 on their tablets.
Some people have just no shame
Re: windows 7 ?
@pcsupport
A tablet doesn't need the huge driver store for one thing. There's no need for any waste of precious solid state memory. Sorry I'm sticking with Android unless Windows 8 addresses the wasted space used by the OS that has nothing to do portable computing.
Pricing, pricing, pricing
Win8RT won't make much of an impression if it's priced to compete with the iPad - the people who will pay $600 for a tablet have already bought an iPad.
Win8RT can't compete on price with the 7" Nexus7 and FireHD (the Surface RT is supposed to have a 10.6" screen).
Unless Microsoft has managed to keep a 7" SurfaceRT under wraps, the 10.6" version is going to have to ship for $300 to make any headway, and it's not clear that it can be built for that price. And unless it has some really killer integration with the XBox, I'm not sure that it will have much mass appeal anyway.
Everyone is just guessing about the size of the tablet market and who owns it
I saw another analyst firm today that announced that tablets would be outselling laptops by next fall (better crank up the tablet production lines if that's gonna come true)
The expectation is that Android will take share from Apple due to price just like it did in the smartphone market, but a lot depends on the pricing of the Android options, what Microsoft does with its pricing since nothing at all has yet been announced, whether Apple introduces a smaller iPad and if so what its price is, whether they keep iPad 2 around as a $299 option next spring like they keep two old iPhone generations around, etc.
I don't know why anyone pays these market research firms anything, two years ago just after the first iPad had been released, none of them thought tablets would amount to much of anything in the market. Three years ago they had netbooks taking over from laptops in a few years. They just look at current trends and extrapolate them to the future. Any of us could do that, if they aren't providing analysis better than what you and I can do with graph paper they have no value. If they told us how quickly the tablet market would grow before Apple even introduced the iPad, or told us netbooks would flop during the peak of their hype, then they'd be earning their fees.
The psychic network ..
This read like the psychic network, unattributable statements introduced to confirm some other unprovable statements ...
"Windows 8 will dent Apple's dominance of the tablet market, but it's biggest impact will be to hold Android's growth back"
`Canalys reckons Android can increase its market share, but only if "vendors make radical improvements to the overall user experience"'
"Indeed, because of what Amazon has done, Canalys thinks the online retail giant will be Apple's key competitor".
