2011-01-25
Poor RIM, a couple of years ago they were _the_ business phone to get and now their market share is just about gone (and the share price, yikes!) and they've spent the past year making bad decision after bad decision...
Android and iPhone are rapidly filling in any feature gaps they had vs Blackberry and Windows Phone will do the same pretty soon leaving RIM with this new Blackberry 10 OS that won't ship till the end of the year. Hmm, I don't sense a success story there, do you?
This week they finally got rid of their Co-CEOs however the new guy seems to be just as set on following a path of near-certain doom as they were. They desperately need to change course...
I've seen a few people recommend Android but Android appears to need anti-virus software as standard and Blackberry has always prided itself on being secure. Plus, Android is a pretty crowded marketplace to try and crack.
RIM seem to be in a similar position to Nokia a year or so ago with their Meego idea but thankfully they saw how tough it would be to start from scratch and attempt to maintain feature parity with the more mature smartphone OSs and went all in on Windows Phone and things are really looking up for them!
As you can probably tell from the image above, my thought is that RIM urgently needs to do the same. They (like Nokia) make great hardware and have some amazing services. And the chances are if someone has a Blackberry, they'll be using a whole raft of Microsoft services too. Seems like a great fit to me.
Plus, I'd love a Windows Phone with the Blackberry design aesthetic! Make it happen, RIM!
