Counterclockwise: HTC One X, Nokia E6, Windows Mobile

Welcome to this week's edition of Counterclockwise – our weekly article that looks back in time at what happened in the last few years. This week it's a rollercoaster as predictions of future market share miss by a mile, while makers of smartphone apps sell for more money than makers of smartphones. We do have several high-profile phone launches to reminisce about too.

Rise and fall

At the very end of March 2011 IDC made some bold predictions – by 2015 iOS and BlackBerry will lose ground and the fresh Windows Phone 7 OS will climb to the #2 spot globally. With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to see the analysts were very wide off the mark.
The prediction for iOS was that it will mostly keep steady and according to Gartner's numbers for 2013 it's doing just that.
Everything else, however, IDC got wrong. For one, its analysts were predicting BlackBerry will slip by a couple of percent, while in 2013 the global share of BB OS was under 2%. Now it's a question of whether the company as a whole will exist in 2015.
The Windows Phone 7 prediction was even less accurate – Microsoft's OS (rather its reincarnation as WP8) is a distant third with less than double BlackBerry's share. Nokia did put out some impressive handsets a few days ago, but we doubt they'll be enough to reach the predicted market share of 21% in less than two years.
A year after IDC's prediction, RIM posted a negative quarter, again, and then CEO Thorsten Heins wanted the company to refocus on the business sector that pushed the company to the top in the past. Since then the company changed its name and its CEO, what didn’t change (unfortunately) is bottom line – it's still red.
As that was going on, Android cracked the 50% mark in the US, securing its position as the top OS there, while the positions of both BlackBerry and Microsoft were slipping. That's not melting Windows Mobile shares either (like how Nokia was losing ground as Symbian lay dying), no this was Windows Phone under-performing.