On a day where a lot of people took out their Blackberries and keyed in the word “sell” because of RIMs less than stellar numbers, I got variants of this question in my inbox today. So, is RIM dead. In a word – yes. Here’s why:
- RIM may make great Blackberries, but they don’t make great smart phones. Example: Here’s what I said when I reviewed the Blackberry 9780:
“By Blackberry standards, this is a great smartphone. I’m impressed by it. However it isn’t going to scare the iPhone 4 in any way shape or form.”
Their stuff is good, but Apple and Google products are better. Unless that changes, RIM will continue to lose market share.
- The Playbook is lame. It shipped without basic functions like e-mail for example. But if you used the Playbook with a Blackberry, that functionality would then magically appear. That’s a great way to ensure a product will be DOA the day it ships. It’s also a great way to hand the tablet market to Apple.
- The two headed CEO approach sucks. Jim Balsillie is too busy trying to buy a hockey team to run this company properly and his buddy Mike Lazaridis who’s got a brilliant mind can’t seem to use it to get better products to market. The fact is that very few companies have the CEO who starts the company around when the company has to make a major shift to get to the next level. RIM if they’re smart will keep that in mind and do the right thing and replace these two. But chances are, that’s not going to happen.
- The Blackberry App World sucks. It has maybe 30,000 apps. Apple’s App Store and the Android Market have ten times that number. Why does this matter? It’s the software that sells smartphones not the hardware. Not only that, it doesn’t help that RIM seems to have an ecosystem that makes people who want to write apps for the platform change their minds, at least briefly.
- Executives are using iPhones. That’s because companies no longer see the Blackberry as the default corporate standard. Why? Simple, you need BES to use Blackberry products in a corporate environment with your MS Exchange server and get top grade security. That’s going to cost you some cash ($4000 for 20 users. $100 for every user after that with volume discounts for 5 or more additional users purchased in one go). There is a freebie version called BES Express, but it doesn’t have a lot of the cool features of the full version of BES. Compare that to using MS ActiveSync with the iPhone. That costs $0 because it’s built into MS Exchange. Seeing as cash is tight for the business crowd, that’s really compelling. Oh yeah, deploying it is really easy and quick. Not to mention that you can get the security features that you should care about (like remote device wipe and SSL encryption) with ActiveSync in the box as it were for $0 as well.
So, there you have it. That’s why I think that RIM is dead. Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.
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This entry was posted on June 18, 2011 at 9:31 am and is filed under Commentary with tags RIM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Hey IT Nerd – Is RIM Dead?
On a day where a lot of people took out their Blackberries and keyed in the word “sell” because of RIMs less than stellar numbers, I got variants of this question in my inbox today. So, is RIM dead. In a word – yes. Here’s why:
“By Blackberry standards, this is a great smartphone. I’m impressed by it. However it isn’t going to scare the iPhone 4 in any way shape or form.”
Their stuff is good, but Apple and Google products are better. Unless that changes, RIM will continue to lose market share.
So, there you have it. That’s why I think that RIM is dead. Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.
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This entry was posted on June 18, 2011 at 9:31 am and is filed under Commentary with tags RIM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.