> reporting both of those things is not moving the goalposts. He made a prediction: You don’t have to look hard to find many other observers with the same bel

> reporting both of those things is not moving the goalposts. He made a prediction: You don’t have to look hard to find many other observers with the same belief — that Android will succeed in the tablet market similarly to how it has succeeded in the phone market. Why the certainty, though? It’s certainly possible, I agree. A 20-1 unit sale lead over all Android tablets combined seems preposterous. But I don’t think it’s certain. It reminds me of the certainty that many observers had, circa 2002-2005, that the iPod could not maintain a 70 percent share of the music player market. The fundamental difference I see between smartphones and tablets is that mobile phones were an existing and long-standing market prior to the iPhone. Apple’s stated goal in 2007 was to get 1 percent of the total mobile phone market by the end of 2008. Most people today still buy phones the same way they did in 2006: they go to their local mobile carrier store and buy whatever the sales staff there convinces them to buy. Over 100 million times, that’s been an Android phone. I see no sign, though, that phone carriers are having any more success selling tablets than they ever were selling anything other than phones. Remember carrier-subsidized netbooks? I’m not trying to cherry-pick data. I’m simply observing, based on Apple’s sales data and Google’s activation data, that the tablet market doesn’t today look anything like the smartphone market ever did. The iPad didn’t enter the tablet market. It created the tablet market. The iPad’s role in the tablet market much more closely resembles the iPod’s role in the digital music player market a decade ago than it does the iPhone’s role in the 2008 phone market. Or as Marco Arment wrote almost seven months ago, there still really is no “tablet” market — just an iPad market.