For the mathematicians amongst you these are the prime factors of 2013!
So after much peering into the rather cloudy corporate crystal ball we think we can foresee:
- iPad Mini’s outselling iPad (Maxi’s) by a 60/40 ratio & new updates arriving (sooner) for the Mini and (rather later) for the Maxi.
- Kindle Fire and Nexus tablets battling it out for second place, to you know who, in the global marketplace throughout the year with the Microsoft Surface making little impact achieving a market share well below 5%
- Tablet sales closing on desktops, laptops etc numerically but not overtaking them. Most netbooks will disappear
- Apple’s market share for tablets being below 50% for the year
- Apple introducing both an iWatch and a (proper) TV in the second half of the year which will not be called the iTV
- Apple selling over 150 million iPhones whilst Windows phones won’t!
- Nook divorcing totally from Barnes & Noble gaining further additional shareholders over and above the historic Microsoft (16.8%) and the newly announced Pearson (5%) who will exercise their option taking them up to 10%
- Mobile internet access overtaking fixed access during the year with “mobile” becoming the most used word on the internet followed closely by “things”!
- Twitter not having an IPO but may add tablets other than the iPad to its (rather Applecentric) log out screen!
- Some of ICANN‘s new gTLD’s being used during the year but not causing general disruption.
- Nominet quietly shelving their direct.uk proposals but introducing a set of additional features for their third level domains with .uk New registrations in the year being around 1.75 million
- England retaining the Ashes in the UK & being well on the way to completing the rout in Australia by 31 December.
- UK overall rainfall in 2013 being less than the 1981-2010 average of 1,154mm and well below this years near record of over 1,330 mm. That’s a staggering 4 foot 4 inches in old money! (Updated 3 January – unbelievably last year was only the second wettest year ever at 1330.7 mm v’s 2000′s 1337.3 – we demand a recount!)
Now for a very brief review of our 2012 predictions which might be summarised as consisting of some mini successes, many 10” failures and omissions a plenty!
With a bit of poetic licence and wearing our corporate rose tinted 3D glasses we reckon we had a success rate of around 33%. [Room for improvement here - ed.]
Mini successes were iPad 2 & 3 continuing to be sold alongside one another and .uk registrations being less than 2 million. We also reckon we were half right in three other cases!
Anyway onwards & upwards!