“Research In Motion’s appointment of bankers to advise on drastic options, including an outright sale of the BlackBerry maker, may only hasten moves by major customers to offer their employees smartphones produced by rivals,” Nicola Leske and Jim Finkle reports for Reuters.
“An increasing number of top companies and government departments that were once devoted to the Blackberry are instead now giving some staff the option of using Apple Inc’s iPhone,” Leske and Finkle reports. “There is now a real danger for RIM that such switching will gather pace and turn into a much bigger exodus of customers, mobile phone industry consultants and experts warned. The uncertainty surrounding RIM’s future, and the possibility of a sale, is ‘scary to an end user,’ said John Hering, chief executive of Lookout, one of the world’s biggest providers of mobile security products.”
Leske and Finkle reports, “Within 12 hours of RIM’s announcement, Hering said, he heard from several corporate technology executives troubled by the news… ‘The organizations using multiple devices have lost confidence in BlackBerry as a platform for the long term,’ said Alex Bratton, CEO of Lextech Global Services, a company that creates mobile applications for companies. He added that as ‘people are doing hardware refreshes they are going in another direction.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: DCW.
RIM are signalling that they are giving up on the company and see no long term prospect for it, so why would a customer buy any product from them from now on ?
Yet again, the management are doing all the wrong things and will ensure that the company vanishes sooner than it needed to.
Consider it a mercy kill. Much better than dragging it out to the very end.
what was that quote, I think from RIM execs regarding iPhone introduction, to the effect of “if these computer guys think they’re coming in here and take over the cell phone business..yadda yadda” ?
That was Ed Colligan, president of Palm. What happened to Palm?
ah, oh okay, thanks Silver.
Even in my small circle, there are now no BB users- and the five rather large companies the former users work for no longer require BB. Needless to say, they all elected to get iPhones. Even the most entrenched are giving up on RIM.
The stink of failure. The stink of death. Everyone with a Blackberry, put it down and walk away.
This collapse of RIM is exactly what could happen to Microsoft (although slower to begin with) in the future. The companies standing amoung customers depends on its big stature. Once that fails, what is left but getting out of the way so it does not crash on you.
A small tree falls fast, a much bigger one falls slower, but still hits the ground.
Many people that I talk to about computers still say…. “But Windows is still on most of the machines in the world…. so it must be a better system”. Sad, so sad.
Just a thought,
en
I’ve heard the same. People equating quantity to quality. Rarely true.
If Union Pacific’s IT department looks anything like their RR equipment, they will be in a world of hurt no matter what their CIO says would happen if RIM goes south. Is there no corporate identity pride at UP anymore?
Just curious: What aspect of UP’s rolling stock touches on the negative, here? I know very little except what I see rolling through yards in Utah and Nevada, and all I see are well-used work horses of locomotives hauling America’s goods cross country. It’s hard to run these things through a car wash after every trip so it’s natural that they look a bit beat up. You should’ve seen the old pufferbillies in their days.
RIM is a greedy selfish arrogant company – as are the retailers in Canada. If the boarder retailers do not smarten up Canadians spend their hard earn cash south of the Boarder.
And then you see more Canadian business in the same situation as RIM… Canadians are robbing the Canadian people.