RIM Deathwatch

It seems with the recently quarterly announcements that a lot of people are catching on to hat I've been saying for almost 2 years. That RIM is on the way out. And I don't mean out of fashion, I mean out of existence.

I hypothesized they had no more than about 5 years left. That means just about 3 now. They haven't shown any signs that they're doing anything to curb their self-destructive behavior. It's just been the same old same old, at least from the perspective of an outsider.

So long RIM. You've lasted a long time for a one-trick pony.

Maybe they can switch to running Windows Phone 7. It's worked so well for Nokia.

Nokia haven't made a real commitment and continue to completely screw up their positioning and message.

I still see a lot of BlackBerry devices being used here in Canada. In fact when I'm out I have only ever seen iPhones or BlackBerries. I have never (not ever) seen an Android device in the wild that wasn't behind glass or on a shelf in a kiosk/store. The other brands battle it out for candy bar and flip phones.

My brother has 3 friends with Android devices and frankly, apart from reading of owners on the net, those are the only people I've ever heard of that have them. Everyone I know personally has either a BlackBerry or iPhone.

It's not that I don't think a company can make it in this market with the competition as it stands, it's just that I don't believe RIM can do it. I can easily see a BlackBerry device gaining market share (a device completely different than what's out there now), but not in RIM's hands.

When I'm in Washington D.C., I see lots of Blackberries and lots of iPhones. When I'm back here at my university, I see lots of Android devices and lots of iPhones. Blackberries are rare to nonexistent until you get off campus and run into people who work for the big oil companies, which are all still Blackberry shops.

It's interesting that the iPhone is making it in both of those very different markets.

Big oil, government, and government contractors are all mostly Blackberry. DOD civilian contractors that have company phones have Blackberries. That is a LOT of Blackberries out there.

RIM is losing all those exclusive contracts. It's the same story here in Canada.

Seems that many Gov people will have a Blackberry for work and an iPhone as their "personal" phone.

Also, for what it's worth, it baffles me that Microsoft isn't trying to advertise and push Win Phone 7 as the "best in class" Exchange client. A bit of digging turned up this 2010 article with feature checkboxes and it seems that WP7 actually has fewer Exchange-related features than earlier Microsoft phone products. (Notable for its absence on this chart: no Blackberry...) If Microsoft could do nothing else, I'd imagine they could do really killer integration with their own mail server.

Heh. You said "best in class" and "Exchange".

Instead of picking up share from RIM, MS seems intent on letting Apple grab it all. And let me tell you, Apple's default iOS mail client, apart from simply "working" at a most basic level, doesn't do much else. I'd even say it blows. But it's not the nightmare of using a BB.