Even Google was blindsided by Android’s success
Posted on | May 15, 2012 | Comments Off
Not even Google predicted just how big Android could grow to be.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET)Back in 2010, Google thought Android had some very nice potential for growth -- at the time, it projected its mobile operating system might even reach more than 200 million installed users by 2013.
Turns out Google was wrong: it busted through the 200 million threshold in 2011 instead and is now on a trajectory for more than 700 million users in 2013.
All this number-crunching is based on Google's internal estimates for Android growth, which recently came out during the Oracle patent trial (see slideshow below). Asymco analyst Horace Dediu dug through the data and compared it with the activation announcements that have been made public to determine that Google greatly underestimated Android's potential.
So far, about 370 million Android devices have been activated, which is between two and three times as much as Google was expecting at this point.