With iPad Sales, Steve Schools the Street Again

In need of a chuckle? Take a look at Wall Street’s first-year iPad sales forecasts. They ranged from 1.1 million at their most conservative to 7 million at their most bullish, and averaged out at 3.3 million. Which is laughably short of the 14.8 million iPads Apple ended up selling in 2010. And, as Horace Dediu notes over at Asymco, indicative of the disruptive change the iPad has initiated in the computing market and the lead Apple has claimed as a result. “If analysts, to a man, fail, you can be sure that competitors are no wiser,” says Dediu. “This collective shrug amounts to the greatest competitive advantage any entrant could ever hope to obtain.”

Indeed. What was it Bill Gates said about the iPad? “It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’”

Mmhmm.