If predictions were horses then Apple competitors would ride. Yes, it’s time to flip over the Unmagic 8 Ball and get another wild guess about what the future will bring.
Writing for The Motley Fool, Evan Niu says “IDC Has Good News for Facebook, Bad News for Apple.” (Tip o’ the antlers to Philip Speicher.)
“What is this news?” the Macalope’s rhetorical construct asks. Thank you for asking, rhetorical construct. That is very helpful for the writing.
Turns out Facebook is big into Virtual Reality while Apple is only (rumored to be) into Augmented Reality, and IDC believe VR is the future.
Of course, Microsoft is also investing in AR but “Bad News For Microsoft” doesn’t make headlines.
Market researcher IDC has just released estimates on the future of AR and VR over the next five years, and the forecasts look decidedly skewed in the social network’s favor.
Oh, no! This is certainly devastating as there have never been any problems with IDC’s predictions ever in the history of their prediction making and all results unfolded as foretold.
…
…
What?
Ohhh, you’re waiting for the Macalope to link to a laughable prediction made by IDC a few years ago that was proved fabulously wrong like, maybe when they said Android’s growth would end in 2012 and Windows Phone would overtake iOS in 2016.
Well, that’s not going to happen.
Please. That would be gauche. The Macalope is above such childish antics.
Speaking of things in the future always going Facebook’s way, anyone remember Facebook Home? No? Facebook Home was all set to “screw Apple” and then a weird thing happened: Nobody used it and it died a quiet death of neglect. Very strange. And rude of reality to interfere with Facebook’s predicted success.
The future is hard to predict. Although, that Facebook Home failure seemed pretty easy.
VR and AR are seen as possible ways to improve worker productivity.
“If we put the goggles on them, they won’t know when it’s time to go home!”
The future’s so bright for our corporate overlords, you must wear these corporate-mandated shades.
AR may be smaller in terms of unit volumes, but IDC actually expects the revenue opportunities associated with AR to be greater in the long term.
So, wait. Apple is in trouble because it’s betting on the smaller market where the profit will be instead of the larger market that will move cheap units? Yes, surely this has never worked out for Apple in recorded history.
Call the Macalope crazy, but when you’re arguing that the very thing that has fueled Apple’s success is bad news for Apple, he thinks you might want to reconsider your argument.