FORTUNE — Microsoft (MSFT) currently has a 4.2% share of the worldwide smartphone market and 0% share of the market for tablet computers, but that didn’t stop Gartner from predicting back in April — two months before this week’s big Windows 8 announcements — that Redmond was about to take a significant share of both.
“IT departments will see Windows 8 as the opportunity to deploy tablets on an OS that is familiar to them and with devices offered by many enterprise-class suppliers,” Gartner’s Carolina Milanesi wrote in an April 7 press release. Without having heard about — never mind seen — the Surface tablets, she predicted that Microsoft would grab a 4.1% share of the tablet market before the end of 2012 and an 11.8% share by 2016. That would put Surface in third place after Apple’s (AAPL) iOS and Google’s (GOOG) Android.
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Posted by david ricketts 
