David Shipley blogs for CanadaEast:
From The Globe and Mail’s Technology section (July 16, 2008):
[RIM Co-CEO Jim] Balsillie made it clear that RIM isn’t sweating the iPhone.
“The key thing is just to charge ahead,” he said. “If you look back you lose your forward momentum … the only thing we can control is getting better products out sooner.”
Shipley asks, “I wonder if a deer caught in a transport truck’s headlights sweats before it gets hit?”
“The only thing RIM is charging ahead to is hard times. RIM isn’t going to disappear overnight, but it’s decline will likely mirror that of the once-great Palm. The Blackberry will remain a strong player in the corporate and government sector for some time to come, but it’s about to get smoked in the consumer market. Meanwhile Apple’s iPhone will make slow, steady inroads into the corporate world,” Shipley writes.
“A problem with RIM’s plan of getting better products out sooner is it assumes you can build something better than the iPhone without violating the boatload of patents Apple has on their latest gadget,” Shipley explains. “Apple, having learned some hard lessons from the early days of the OS wars, has prepared thoroughly for the roll out of the iPhone.”
“Another problem is it also assumes Apple isn’t already developing future generations of iPhones that leap even further ahead, making it hard for RIM to match the iPhone, let alone surpass it,” Shipley writes.
“The iPhone isn’t going to crush its smart phone competitors because its hardware is sleeker (although it is) and it’s not going to beat them because its software is more intuitive, powerful and easy-to-use (which, again, it is), the iPhone is going to win the most important technology battle of the 21st century because the iPhone as a platform (hardware, iPhone software, iTunes and the App Store) represents an unbeatable combination,” Shipley writes.
Full article (most of which we’ve excerpted with permission) and other Apple-related articles via CanadaEast.com here.
We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in. – Palm CEO Ed Colligan, commenting on then-rumored Apple iPhone, Nov. 16, 2006
The last we heard, Cooligan (and his company) was lying in a corner somewhere yelling, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”
Will RIM Co-CEO* Balsillie be next?
*Jimmy needs a helper to do his job.
“The iPhone isn’t going to crush its smart phone competitors because its hardware is sleeker (although it is) and it’s not going to beat them because its software is more intuitive, powerful and easy-to-use (which, again, it is), the iPhone is going to win the most important technology battle of the 21st century because the iPhone as a platform (hardware, iPhone software, iTunes and the App Store) represents an unbeatable combination,” Shipley writes.”
A perfect summary of the situation.
To Doghouse Riley:
” . . . but well done, we need more writers of your elk, uh I mean ilk.”
I herd that.
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Look, coming to this site lately has taught me something about stupidity. Business’s have been using a crappy OS for a long time. One reason is because they don’t know any better. Another reason is the are cheap and not very insightful. They go cheap early and pay a shit load forever. Instead of paying a little more up front to save a lot over the long haul.
So why would business stop using blackberry’s exactly? They have already invested in the platform. Will more business’s be getting iPhone’s as needed? Absolutely. More iPhone will be bought from here on out than Blackberry’s, but RIM isn’t going out of business anytime soon.
Current quarter……
Apple sells 8-10 million iPhone’s
RIM sells 3-5 million blackberry’s
MDN, save this stat and then post it again in October.
And….Nokia is laughing all the way to the bank with 40% of the WORLD’S marketshare of cellular telephones……..
I love my iPhone 3G. Just “tits”.
I feel for those people that listened to that asshole Cramer who said buy RIM, maybe now nobody will follow what that loser says when it comes to investing in Apple.
Well RIMM is up almost 6%, so much for investors listening to the downgrade. If that was Apple, it would have tanked 10 points today. Nothing makes sense anymore in the market.
I manage all the Blackberry phones at my place of employment. We’ve heavily invested in Blackberry infrastructure. We have Blackberry Enterprise Servers with support contracts. We have 2-year carrier contracts on all our phones. And our carrier is not AT&T;.
We’re not going to change our cell carrier, void all our existing phone contracts and pay early termination fees, and throw away all our Blackberries, just to get iPhone into the enterprise. I’d imagine we’re not unusual in that regard… hey, have you heard? There’s a recession going on.
Apple’s opportunity is in the consumer market space, or through renegade upper management. Guerilla infiltration. A bigwig exec gets an iPhone on his own and then bulldogs IT into hooking him up to the Exchange server. Someone else sees that and gets one for himself. And so on…
It’s going to be a slow process, but I do think Apple will eventually achieve significant corporate presence with the iPhone. It’s just that it’s going to take years, not months.
monocultures are bad. Just look at Windows, another good virus and much of the world suffers.
No one company should control a majority of any given product catagory.
MS has too much of the OS/Office market. They got there by doing some smart and some illegal things. They have a monopoly and the world is suffering for it. However, the Windows market dominance is being challenged now and I hope that the challenge continues with Mac OS and Linux both taking a goodly chunk of MS’s lunch.
Apple has too much of the portable music player market. They got there by simply being the best. I wish that someone could do better.
Google has too much of the search market. They got there by being the best. We might all suffer for it if MS manages to mess up Yahoo somehow and Google then manages to overwhelm what’s left. Google may be good, but even their search algorithms don’t find everything.
RIM has a reasonable component of the smart phone market. They got there by their focus on one market and doing it well. They will probably loose some market share to Apple and Android but they aren’t going away soon. Palm and Windows Mobile, however, are toast.
I would prefer to see at least three players in each of these markets, each tearing at each other’s throats. This is when good things happen faster.
– gws
RIM taking aim at Apple is like the ‘Star Wars’ missile defense system fiasco.
The success of it actually working is like the probability of hitting a speeding bullet out of the air with another bullet.
Not gonna happen, McGee. . .
Nokia is the new dell.
Their the market leader. Since they really don’t make much money per phone, they have to sell a lot of phones. And boy do they. Actually though, the profits on these phones are okay.
Nokia’s problem going forward, trying to make more profit per phone. It’s going to be hard to sell 1 million N95’s in a month, let alone 3 days.
Someone look up how long Nokia has been building phones, then tell me again how long Apple has been building them?
It’s not game, set, match……. but just like in every other market, Apple will be the company making the majority of the profits, and sustaining the most growth quarter over quarter.
13 billion for the Christmas quarter, again bookmark it.
The clock is ticking…
The down slope is is a killer…
To which I say hang on for dear life cause the ride down is a “E” ticket for sure!
Speaking of RIM mirroring Palm, I have a neat little “Mirror” app on my Palm. It turns the screen completely black.
@MDN
Cooligan’s in a corner doing WHAT with his Palm!?!?
R2: No, I’ve never used a Blackberry or an iPhone. Just stating my opinion.
Mr. Peabody: I referred to Apple and RIM. I made no mention of MicroSoft.
BB will become a niche player. Only BB fanboys will use them.
Another poster says, “No one company should control a majority of any given product catagory.”
Um – Duh!
But here’s the thing: MS has culturalized all of our personal computing experiences in a way that has us feeling that if I can get it to work, then hooray! As opposed to getting it to work and work well, and work the way that I might actually expect it to. So then, that feeds into the whole, why would I spend real money on something that I just need to work – and I feel lucky if it does just [barely] work. And there you have why people who have used nothing but MS products wonder why anyone would spend a little more to begin with.
correction:
Ed Zander – Motorola – “how do they deal with us?”