The mobile market has been an area that we have all been interested in for a number of years. It really took off with the smartphone market and then in the last couple of years it has garnered great attention with the arrival of the tablet. What will change in 2013 is largely around what the market drivers are — we will see dramatic changes to the market drivers that lead less to disruptive changes and more to evolutionary changes in the market itself.
- The market will not be dominated by disruptive technologies as much as it will be by evolutionary changes to existing product sets. Don’t expect net new markets to open up like Apple was able to do with the iPhone and then the iPad. Expect both the smartphone and the tablet market to be dominated by incremental improvements to existing product sets. Disruptive technologies, Google’s Glass for example, are probably not going to make a big impact in 2013.
- We will see continued and increased dominance in the smartphone market by Apple and Android devices. This will come at the expense of RIM’s market share and will contribute to the continued challenges Microsoft has had in establishing itself as a player in this space.
- The tablet market will become increasingly varied. Up to now, the iPad has been dominant, but expect to see real use of both Android and Microsoft tablets in the enterprise.
- We will see consolidation in the software market that caters to mobile device infrastructure — especially with respect to enterprise use of mobile technologies. As this space matures, we will see more of the smaller vendors merge or lose out to the larger established infrastructure vendors.
- For software that is used by mobile device users, software development will become more cloud focused. And specifically, HTML5 will become less hype and more of an essential aspect to creating competitive software for mobile devices.
