Cody Willard blogs for Marketwatch, “For years I liked RIMM and I traded it, usually to the long side, when I was running money a few years ago. But I’m not sure I’d ever get long RIMM again, and I’ll give you three quick reasons why:”
1. The apps. It’s not about the number of apps. It’s about how easy it is to use the apps and how many apps actually bring value.
2. The enterprise. That’s really where Blackberry built its dominance — by taking over corporate mobile email. And they owned it with 90% marketshare initially. But all that marketshare that Blackberry was had is eroding and the rest is there for the taking. I’m seeing an increasing number of executives bring out their iPhones during meetings and to tap out emails. When the execs get their tech guys who are still running on the “you can’t get fired for using Blackberry” mentality to finally commit to letting the company employees choose between the iPhone and Blackberry, it’s gonna be a long down hill for Blackberry’s hold on the enterprise.
3. What’s Blackberry’s future market? If they can’t compete with the best consumer phones when it comes to playability, form factor, and general app usefulness, and if they can’t maintain their outsized marketshare at the enterprise, Blackberry’s suddenly got an identity crisis on its hands.
Willard blogs, “I think RIMM eventually gets bought out by somebody like Microsoft or even Google someday, but that day is several years off and I think there’s little potential upside and lots of potential downside because of these apps/marketshare/enterprise concerns.”
Full article here.
My my. How things change so quickly. Tomorrow is not guaranteed. To Anybody
As usual, RIM has to die for iPhone to succeed and for Apple to succeed, blackberry has to die.
Bullshit.
Cody gives Android too much credit! Android will become the also-ran in the category…as long as doesn’t fsck up and get too greedy & controlling…as they did in 80’s
“As usual, RIM has to die for iPhone to succeed and for Apple to succeed, blackberry has to die.
Bullshit”
I agree. iPhone currently has a 2.5% worldwide share. Quadruple that and iPhone is still a small player by comparison, but is wildly successful.
Having said that, I agree with the author’s thesis, and wouldn’t touch RIMM with a 10 foot pole.
once business actually start buying phones again(do you really think they have been buying as many phones, or replacing older ones as they did before the crash?) they will look to RIM, and yes i can see them giving an option to get another (like i phone). How can you knock a company that has 90% of the corporate market and can still expand that in any BRIC nation. The i phone is cool, personally i find it very hard to typr on as oppose to the blackberry or palm, phones wih push buttons for one. Business people are not app crazy like the consumer market, one reason RIM doesn’t focus on apps like apple.
That is the worst written article I’ve read in a long time.
RIMM has two issues:
1. It has lost the high end market to Apple
2. It has an outdated OS which can’t compete with Apple.
#1 means that RIMM are having to cut their margins to compete (ie the 2 for 1 promotion).
#2 means that they are unable to provide the type of services that the iPhone has.
Moving to Android or WebOS may be their only option in the long term. If they are smart they would do an Apple and innovate to stay competitive.
Otherwise they will end up like the DoDo – hunted into extinction by smarter and deadlier predators.
@ DogGone: RIM doesn’t need to moved to Android or WebOS, but it does need to upgrade its OS.
Let’s talk about success.
1. There can be only one leader.
2. All the followers generally follow the leader, terribly.
3. Leaders positions will always change.
4. Music players will not always be dominated by iPods, one day this will change….. not any time soon of course.
5. The iPhone platform will dominate mobile computing and mobile communication for the next 10-20 years. Count on it like I count on this horrile English style wheater of North Central Ohio.
6. Apple will always have 30%+ margins as long as Steve Jobs is running the show.
7. Microsofts dominance in market share will somewhat continue, we will have fewer manufacturers.
Apple will have 500 stores open in about 4-5 years, close to a 17% US market share and a 10% world market share. Then there is the case that if you are still reading this you shouldn’t be because I ran off topic and will soon enough be accused of hijacking the thread by some jack ass.
PS, if you throw in the iPhone platform, you can up those market shares by 5-10%.
Thank you.
Idiot. Why would Google buy a non Droid cell phone and why would you need to buy a company when you can make your own Google Droid smart phone yourself for nothing over the cost of the phone. RIMM brings nothing to the table!
@ Mike,
Your claim the you find the iPhone difficult to type on is funny. What did you type that post on? Atleast your iPhone has enough respect for the readers of your post to auto correct for you. What we have all determined is that it is not the idea of typing on the iPhone you find difficult, it is typing in general.
Be more honest and you will have more success. Just say you don’t like the iPhone for the same reason my brother doesn’t like the iPhone because everyone wants one. He said the same thing about the iPod and so he bought a Zune.
Poeple do all sorts of stupid things. This company I built houses for wanted to cut my pay by $6 an hour when the housing market started to collapse. I quit. Surely you can see how stupid that was. :::)))
@ Mike,
My apologies, I completely missed your other “smart” comment. Do you know how many business’s have built and are building Apps for both internal and commercial use. If you have a wife and kids I think you should be ashamed for not knowing facts in general. Sadly you are probably the same parent that is unaware of things going on in there kids lives that could be harmful for/to them. If you are not married and don’t have kids, please keep it this way. The last thing we need is another political/church going parent who has no clue to why politics and church are or are not important and yet they swear by both.
Ignorance, a chronic and blistering state that seems to infect more and more people. Stupid people should stop having sex. No Mike, I am not saying your parents are stupid. I am just saying clearly they were stupid when you were conceived.
Thank you.
@Jarret daily news
you went off topic as soon as you wrote your keys for success.
‘Business people are not app crazy like the consumer market, one reason RIM doesn’t focus on apps like apple.’
I call bullshit on that. Business people would love to have the apps but they are:
1) clued out.Many do not know that these apps exist…I know many RIM users..but they would love to use the iPhone if only they knew about them.
2) thrifty. The business pays for their crackberry so they will not pony up for an iPhone. If however, the company would agree to give a choice….things would change in a heartbeat. Rimm wouldn’t stand a chance.
Its over for RIMM and Blackberry.
iPhone and Apple are encircling them, and next, going to cut off and kill them in the enterprise as soon as the last remaining dinosaurs are extinguished.
They OS is for shit, they have nothing to leverage (no music, no real apps, no video).
Dump that stinking dog of a stock or suffer the consequences.
Your scathing attacks on mike are overblown, especially that talk about parentage. What does your mom and dad have to do with the facts or your rants? Are you blaming them for your shortcomings?
i really want to know how old the commenters on this site are. I’ll put my money on a demographic under the age of 21. Apps music and video capabilities make a good enterprise smartphone? A touchscreen? Ridiculous.
@ Jack’s ass
Absolutely my parents are to blame for my short comings. As your parents are for yours, so of course I would attack Mike’s parents for not giving him the important life skill of learning about new things and not just think you know about new things.
Thank you.
@ Hujo,
34 and counting. Married (2x) five kids.
Sat by a Bold user on Sat. 1/2 real estate was all buttons that won’t get out of the way, and he was fighting the thing just to navigate or do anything. I asked him how he liked it and he rolled his eyes. I was going to bring out the iPod touch out of my pocket, but I decided to not rub it in.
@Hujo
I am 53 with teens in the house. People travel alot and their phone keeps them in touch but it also can keep them amused in airports or trains as well as help them find restaurants in strange places…you see where I am going with this.
I know a number of Blackberry users that bring an iPod touch to do all this things I mentioned and use their Blackberry to phone and email simply because the company is PAYING for it. They would love to have both integrated together.
Think outside the box man…..
This is unabashed nonsense. RIM will do just fine and succeed in many ways. Cody Willard is a joke. The market is expanding too rapidly for smartphones and RIM has the only architecture that helps carriers save money by offloading bandwidth from the carrier network. Just ask Att how much they have had to sink into their network to keep up with the iPhone bandwidth usage. With the recent Torch acquisition and announcements at their developers conference, the blackberry will continue to thrive as a platform. Of course I expect to get flamed here on a Mac fan(atic) site but I won’t listen to this unabashed BS from a piker like Cody Willard. And it’s not like your precious iPhone won’t keep kicking ass too, but to say RIM is done is flat out stupid when global smartphone sales are expected to rise from an annual run rate of 160mln devices in 2009 to 500mln devices annually by 2015 or so.
@Gregg Thurman
That’s 2.5% of all phones, not the smart phones, right?
People are mixing two market shares, sometimes intentionally.
As much as this SOUNDS logical… it was also “logical” that [insert name of company or technology] would kill the ipod and that macs would lose share due to high prices in the recession.
One little problem: none of these things actually happened.
And so, for all the theory that RIM is obsolete and doomed, there is one little fly in the ointment: they’re growing share at least as fast as Apple. Maybe that will change… but no evidence so far.
Also, the coming dominance of Android is also just… theory. No evidence so far. None.
It took the Storm 2 years since Jobs first keynote showing the iPhone to even get something decent out the door, and it barely compares…and they forgot about making the SDK simpler or a more intuitive app store to compete during the same time period. RIMM has been sitting on their thumbs.
They have one product out and four or five variations of that product to look diverse, but in reality, they are getting killed in innovation and are desperately playing catchup. Their announcements last week are due middle of 2010…The next iPhone will be out in June, plus about 50,000 more apps to boot.
RIMM is LATE, LATE, LATE. The two CEO’s have been sitting on their thumbs resting on their cult shareholders fanaticism, while the smartphone bandwagon passed them by. People who love Blackberries are hanging on to a thread. RIMM needs to invent something, and invent it fast, as they are quickly headed to third place, not second place.