“Research In Motion Ltd. customers from GoDaddy Group Inc. to asset manager Thames River Capital UK Ltd. are preparing for the worst: the loss of the BlackBerry service their employees depend on to communicate,” Scott Moritz and Olga Kharif report for Reuters. “Corporate customers, the backbone of RIM’s business, are fortifying contingency plans so they won’t be affected by a possible breakup of BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion Ltd., or other setbacks. ‘In the past three months there’s been a lot of concern that the BlackBerry platform won’t be around in the future,’ said Maribel Lopez, founder of Lopez Research, a wireless- industry consultant based in San Francisco. ‘It’s not unheard of for a large phone manufacturer to go out of business.'”
“Corporate customers, the backbone of RIM’s business, are fortifying contingency plans so they won’t be affected by a possible breakup of the BlackBerry-maker or other setbacks. With millions of employees connecting to the office through mobile e- mail, companies have been eager to establish a fallback or replacement plan, said Avi Greengart, a technology research director at Current Analysis,” Moritz and Kharif report. “Thames River Capital supplies about 140 of its 170 employees with smartphones, most of them BlackBerrys, said Robert Cockerill, head of infrastructure at the London-based money manager. With the delay of BlackBerry 10 and a service contract with RIM expiring this year, Cockerill said he expects much of his staff to switch to Apple Inc.’s iPhone… Norton Rose LLP, a law firm with 6,000 BlackBerry-equipped employees, is using MobileIron’s software to support iPhones and iPads, which were given to some staff members as secondary devices, said Vlad Botic, group enterprise architect at the London-based firm.”
Moritz and Kharif report, “The migration from BlackBerrys started two years ago for Ken Lawonn, senior vice president of strategy and technology at Alegent Health, an Omaha, Nebraska-based health-care provider… ‘Should something occur, we believe that’s going to be a fairly easy transition,’ Lawonn said. ‘If my BlackBerry broke down, I’d look at the options, and if a BlackBerry wasn’t available, I’d pick up an iPhone and be on my way.'”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Gotta love it.
I’d like to see Microsoft die the same way.
Now that would be fun to watch.
Open your eyes! Cuz the rest of us have been enjoying it for years now…
Hoping Apple has a plan to deploy if and when RIM shutters its doors. It’d be a shame not to tap into this segment with proper in-house support or rely on 3rd party solutions.
Moritz keeps moving around. I wonder if his total Apple bashing days are behind him; I doubt it.
Scott Moritz… the dude that penned the iPad as the iFlop. I’m surprised anyone listens to him after that major flub. How do you live with a call like that about a device that’s practically changed the face of the computing industry.
The way you live with it is to point out that the rest of the smart guys said much the same thing; thus, your only real crime was conventional thinking, just a moral misdemeanor.
The dirty little secret, of course, is that in reality, each of those smart guys is guilty of a moral felony—being arrogant, biased, unethical, disingenuous stooges, while being overpaid for lazy, biased consensus thinking in the form of planted stories, invented “rumors”, and outright fabrications.
This is exactly how big companies die. They are the standard, up and until people start talking about them having problems, about the possibility that they will stop.
Then, suddenly one then another and another big customers move to another platform. More and more customers do this and then suddenly writers are writing about the great migration…. Suddenly everyone seems to be moving.
Microsoft could end in just this way.
IE moves below 50%. People start moving to other web browsers and with Apple you can run windows and still check out Apple. Microsoft makes another Vista mistake and loses billions…. Suddenly people start looking for a back up incase Microsoft crashes…
People start moving away in droves and writers start writing about it. The perception of death becomes a reality.
Quarter after quarter, the income slides down…….
Around and around the bowl she goes…..
Just a thought.
en
b
Perversely I want RIM to survive and be a third force in mobile computing or at least in mobile telephony. I don’t want RIM to die simply because they, along with Nokia, were honest enough not to steal ideas from Apple, unlike Google, and to actually make an effort to brew their own operating system.
To think that RIM was totally dominant 5 years ago to the extent that the first iteration of pre-release Android mimicked the feature set of a BlackBerry. Only when Eric Schmidt was shown the iPhone OS did Google pinch the idea for the Android look and feel, not least involving the areas of capacitive touchscreen and slide to unlock, to name a few.
I know many lawyers and investment banking professionals who swear by their Blackberries due to the physical keyboard and would not under any circumstances willingly switch to an iPhone simply because they are more comfortable with a physical keyboard. I think that should be RIM’s market – targeting professionals rather than the consumer market. I think they lost that to Apple a long time ago and I don’t think a new OS will help regain that, except marginally.
By the time BB 10 is released in 2013, the iPhone 5 will have been on the market for at least 6 months and the iPad 4 will have been released so people will tend not to switch once they’re locked into the Apple ecosystem due to the cost of repurchasing all the apps.
“I don’t want RIM to die simply because they, along with Nokia, were honest enough not to steal ideas from Apple, unlike Google, and to actually make an effort to brew their own operating system.”
I agree! RIM was stupid and arrogant but not unethical. It’s google (and samsung) that needs to die.
It doesn’t get much sweeter than that for Apple. Now if only Apple could get the government to change their monotonous tune about how they can’t use anything except BlackBerries with their unbeatable security.
OK, just got a great idea, If anyone wants in on this, LMK. We make a snap-on cover to fit the iPhone, on the surface is a full scale BB keyboard, with the same look and feel (or at least different enough not to infringe copyrights) with a little window about the same size and shape as a BB so that you can see part of the iPhone screen through that. Bundle it with an app that uses bluetooth so now the snap-on keyboard can control the iPhone, Maybe we can call the whole setup iRimapple?? Would certainly make all those who like the BB keyboard as a way of input happy campers, and me rich so I can buy more APPL.