RIM to exit the consumer phone market
Push to be pulled from the High Street
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Having persuaded many a teenager to adopt the BlackBerry, RIM last night gave them the finger - metaphorically - and announced it was focusing on big businesses instead, an action spurred by its lousy quarterly results.
Some say RIM did poorly in the consumer market, but it certainly built up a strong customer base among younger customers, more keen on messaging than talking.
Where RIM failed, it was in the top-end of the consumer market. Here, yes, it was unable to compete with the brightly lit, well-marketed iPhone and the many Android touchscreen devices being promoted by network operators.
Winning over teens is all very well, but they're far less lucrative than the kind of folk adopting Apple and Android phones, a generally much better off lot.
Tightening RIM's focus on corporates shows that the company accepts its failure to take on Apple and co., but as more big firms allow employees to use their own handsets these days - they're the very folk who've adopted iPhones and Android smartphones in their personal lives - there's less opportunity there than there once was.
Hardware, then, is RIM's weak spot. It can't compete in the segments of consumer market where the money is, and enterprise users are no less keen on consumer smartphone technology. They don't want to carry two phones around: a BlackBerry for email, and an iPhone to call family and friends.
Ten years ago, RIM was debating its own removal from handset manufacturing, the notion being that it would focus on server software and client code other phone makers could bundle.
But its hardware margins were too high to resist, and the scheme was knocked on the head. That was an understandable move when it seemed that RIM's keyboard phones were exactly what an email-hungry adult world wanted. But that's no longer the case. It's clearly time to dust off that old strategy. ®
COMMENTS
Forget the hardware
From a Corporate security perspective BB blows away using iphones or Androids, but lets face it their phones are about as sexy as Anne Widdecombe in a thong.
They have the secure infrastructure in place, what they should do is create a Blackberry/RIM client for ios and android and concentrate on providing secure remote working environments which enduser can use on the device of their choosing.
Teens
Surely if you give up on them now, and lose teens to the Apple/Android side, they're even more likely to change to or stick with Apple and Android when they become wealthy corporates or wealthy benefit/dolescum? Who will be left using RIM then?
I give it 2 out of 5 Nokias on the Fail Scale
They're just not trying, sure they've got their C* jumping ship, and retreating to their traditional market, but if they want to score higher they really should be calling their customers muppets, or saying their entire SW stack is obsolete and hurting them, and are switching wholesale to a poorly regarded and largely untested and unpopular alternative.
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