How beleaguered RIM’s half-CEOs lost an empire

14 years ago

“Research In Motion, whose BlackBerry phones pioneered wireless email, no longer holds the commanding heights in the smartphone market,” Jesse Hicks reports for The Verge. “The past year has been especially hard on the once-innovative RIM, but it may be at a turning point. Or the beginning of the end.”

“There was Mike Lazaridis, four years post-iPhone, sitting with BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones for a quickie interview and product demo. Stout and gray-haired, glasses perched on his nose, and wearing a grey BlackBerry polo shirt, Lazaridis pitched the tablet as delivering “an uncompromised experience in enterprise.” He continued in the same vein, gamely batting away questions about the iPad’s dominance. Though not a terribly compelling presenter, Lazaridis delivered his bullet points competently, if somewhat disjointedly,” Hicks reports. “Then the interview turned.”

Hicks covers oodles of tales regarding RIM’s headlong dive into beleaguerment and concludes, “A final analysis comes from the man whose company pulled the rug out from under RIM in 2007. Speaking in late 2010, he said, ‘They must move beyond their comfort area into the unfamiliar territory in trying to become a software platform company. I think it’s going to be a challenge for them to create a competitive platform and to convince developers to create apps for yet a third platform after iOS and Android. With 300,000 apps on Apple’s app store RIM has a high mountain ahead of them to climb.’ That man, of course, was Steve Jobs.”

Tons more in the full article – recommended – here.

MacDailyNews Take: DCW.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Daniel N.” for the heads up.]