RIM Out

Original author: John Biggs, Techcranch
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Research In Motion will finish its story soon. Over the next year or so, they will be bought, and the product line will merge with the host company - most likely Microsoft, and they will follow the path of Nokia, Danger and other countless mobile platforms. Having existed for some time independently, they will still be absorbed. Everything is over.

And that's why.

Today there is no money in the market of "business" phones. Blackberry are not status symbols. They are just the mobile equivalent of the large, thick business laptops that still stand out in some IT departments at US companies. They are sedate, boring and restless, but people are still lapped to them and to e-mail, for the work with which these devices are still suitable. This is where it all ends.


These phones are increasingly being replaced by newer and more popular devices on iOS and Android. Today, no one will be fired for installing BES , but you can be sure that if in the near future RIM does not begin to support WebDAV standards, then they will begin to abandon it in large numbers.

You can earn a lot of money by selling iron to a crowd of buyers - you can be sure of this. But when they start saving, refusing to pay money for devices, where will all these consumers go? On the same platform to which they have been attached all these years?

The BlackBerry audience is already gone. I remember how a few years ago I was invited to MTV (and never called again) to talk about “top-end smartphones”. I think it was in 2007. The list included Windows Mobile devices - the new Sidekick and, unexpectedly, the BlackBerry Curve . The result of the study was that Sidekick easily defeats almost all competitive devices, but what I can’t understand at all is how Curve, with all its merits, generally got on this list. Sidekick is a lifestyle device and even HTC Dash on WinMo can be considered the same . But curve? Never.

RIM still has an audience, but this audience is constantly narrowing. It can be argued that their business has not been doing very well lately, but even so - there are a huge number of other manufacturers on the market - now including Microsoft - which are much more attractive from a general point of view. Even BBM doesn't sound tempting anymore, especially in the era of Facetime, Qik, and Hipchat.

As for RIM rivals, they are stronger and faster. Android has already taken the lead, and iOS is closely behind the global market. If any clashes occur between them, then RIM always remains in third place with a decent lag. I would even say that Windows Phone will be a more attractive business solution for which RIM has nothing to offer. What can a company do to get out of this deadly tailspin? Start producing consumer (that is, for the total mass of customers) phones? No, already tried . Maybe new business phones? No, already tried . Release a tablet? No, no . Which brings us to the next point:

They lost the tablet race. Totally. RIM today believes that they will be able to sell 800,000 Playbooks, with an initial market estimate of 2.4 million. Even if every Blackberry owner will be required to buy a Playbook because of corporate policy, but they probably will not even be able to sell them in such quantities.

Playbook is a beautiful, well-coordinated device. But he is too late, and too inconvenient for the average user / buyer. The biggest mistake? RIM failed to provide each customer with a native e-mail out of the box. So, short and concise. The biggest name in the world of email devices cannot provide you with email.

No matter what they change, they cannot change the past. Look at the video below, where the Nokia manager shows the performance of Meego on one of the latest smartphones of the company. Looks pretty good?



But this is not so. And it will never see the light of day, and all the work spent on assembling the mobile OS and fastening the interface to it will soon be lost. Why? Because it’s too late, and too little. Nokia, the giant of the mobile industry, today exists only in the form of a shell of its own great past. RIM can, and most likely will, go the same way.

The fate of RIM is written in capital letters on every corner in this world. Each major corporate mobile system is tailored to their system, but now they are slaves of their own success. They cannot sell anything other than devices with a full-sized keyboard at a time when the value of the keyboard is constantly decreasing or it is generally hidden until needed. The lack of imagination on the side of the consumer and the manufacturer is their course. In a world where every phone is already smart and can work with e-mail, there is no reason to recommend RIM instead of another phone. It's all over and now we are just waiting for interesting offers to buy one of the greatest mobile companies in modern history.

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