“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.'”
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