Oh wow, look it’s the new iPhone! Wait, it’s Blackberry 10 pala!
It’s no secret that the once darling smartphone manufacturer Research in Motion has been losing ground to more elegant operating systems Android, iOS and yes even Windows Phone. It doesn’t seem apparent if you live in the Philippines, but globally RIM is skidding into a downward slope, with tipping points including the huge service outage of their BBM service in the USA last October 2011. Because 3rd party developers and iOS have created their own platform-specific BBM-like services, RIM is slowly losing its edge in technology.
RIM lost significant market share worldwide to Apple’s iPhone and to smartphones running Google’s Android operating system, which caused a decline in profit and share value. On December 16, 2011 RIM shares fell to their lowest price since January 2004 and the stock dropped 77 percent in 2011 alone. By March 2012 shares were worth less than $14, from a height of over $140 in 2008. The BlackBerry PlayBook, launched in 2011 as a business-oriented alternative to the Apple iPad, was a critical and commercial failure. Meanwhile, chief executive Thorsten Heins reaffirmed RIM’s business focus, explaining that consumer-friendly features like entertainment applications are not important to the company’s core customers. [source]
One thing RIM still does have is their amazing push email service which has been unmatched in compressing data through the airwaves. In simpler terms, if I were BlackBerry, instead of trying to develop a new mobile OS and licensing it to other manufacturers (which is a dumb strategy), I would focus my efforts on licensing their push email server to all other platforms.
The new Blackberry 10 look great but we’re done with the era of features because these come a dime a dozen. We’re in the era of ecosystems and right now, RIM is trailing behind three other application marketplaces. Will the newly redesigned OS hamper conversions of legacy Blackberry applications as well?
