Does RIM stand a chance against Apple?
It may be too soon to write RIM off, but as it stands, I don’t see how the company even has a chance against Apple and its iPhone 3G. Call me a cynic, but doesn’t it seem awfully ironic that RIM has yet to make any major statements about the iPhone launch? To me, it looks like a company that’s deathly afraid of Apple and still has no idea how it wants to respond to the success of its main competitor.
According to Apple, it sold 1 million iPhone 3Gs in the first weekend of its release and the new smartphone is sold out in dozens of states all across the United States. All the while, I haven’t heard one mention of the BlackBerry and more often than not, people are only mentioning it to compare its issues to the benefits of owning an iPhone 3G.
Needham & Co. analyst, Charlie Wolf on Wednesday said that although RIM is still the leader in the smartphone market, it might not last much longer.
"While RIM's dominance of the enterprise market appears secure, at least for now, the company's great growth driver-the consumer market-is bound to come under siege because of the iPhone,” he said. “We're cutting RIM from a hold to an underperform rating and reducing estimates."
Is this just the beginning of an increasingly dangerous ride for RIM and its once-dominant BlackBerry? The way I see it, RIM is in an extremely precarious position right now and as the iPhone continues to sell well and companies start taking notice of its new features, I simply don’t know how RIM can compete.
With the addition of push email, contacts, and calendar, along with Exchange support, the iPhone is now on equal footing with the BlackBerry in the enterprise space. And although it has already solidified itself in the consumer sector, Apple needed to take control of the enterprise and with the addition of these features, it’s well on its way.
Aside from that, the App Store has proven to be a major success for the company and has already exceeded expectations.
And while Apple was enjoying all its success, RIM has been left behind just waiting for its opportunity to make a headline and finally move the iPhone 3G off the front page. But the reality of the situation dictates that that’s probably not going to happen.
At its most basic level, the differences between the BlackBerry and iPhone 3G are major. Although both offer the kind enterprise functionality expected of popular smartphones, we can’t underestimate the fact that the iPhone alone is a far more impulse-worthy device.
Let’s face it – if you don’t care about the technical differences between the BlackBerry and iPhone and you’ve been listening to how wonderful the latter is for over a week and you see both sitting side-by-side in an AT&T store, which would you pick? The plans cost the same, both perform basic business tasks, both have application stores, but only one has a touchscreen and only one has been gushed over by media personalities all across the world.
Try as it might, RIM doesn’t stand a chance against the iPhone right now. And although I’m not going to say that it’ll be this way forever, I should note that RIM better get to work on something unique and revolutionary if it wants to hold Apple back.
If it doesn’t, the war is already over.
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I highly enjoy the fact that
I highly enjoy the fact that I just read this article on my new iPhone 3G after discarding my Blackberry Curve.Ironic.
Have you actually looked at
Have you actually looked at the market share figures? I work for a rather large employer, and our handheld deployment device standard is the Blackberry. We have deployed over 40,000 of these devices through all parts of our organization. And not one iPhone yet.At the WES 2008 conference in Orlando this year, I met two other individuals who work for even larger companies. Once again, the Blackberry is in widespread use throughout their respective companies.
It's far too soon (far too soon) to claim that the iPhone will dethrone the Blackberry. The Exchange integration in 2.0 will help to close the gap, but it will take many years (if it ever happens at all) to bring the number of deployed iPhones to the level of deployed Blackberrys.
Tara, I think you may have
Tara, I think you may have missed one small point here. Corporate prosumers make about a drop or two in a bucket of consumers out there. What is fascinating, however, is that Apple is flirting with both groups with pretty much a single device (with just 3 minor variations - 8GB, 16GB black & white). That blurring of the target groups with a single product release - by a brand new player, takes more than guts or killer-instincts. It's a borderline arrogant lunacy, some call moxie. Steve Jobs, I have come to believe, has that. On that note, Nokia etc. mostly serve/dominate the 'non-smartphone' market, but they don't generate as high a profit and revenue margin as Apple generally enjoys with almost all its products. To think this is just the point of entry, just a knock on the door, with the vast fields of possibilities of a platform awakening... go ahead, think on that a bit. Meanwhile, even if you have secured the greatest engineers in your team, do you have the access point for a brand new OS to penetrate that the world will be ready to recognise, let alone embrace as a new platform? You need an established OS for that. Hardly any room left for new standards bypassing intellectual properties and patents. Just not economically and technically feasible. Apple just used mostly in-house stuff, with decades of experience in OS (and a great one at that, keyword: desktop quality), solid hardware-software in house integration, design and commercial lessons/base from iPod, iTunes support as backend content funneling, and a few fans willing to shoulder any 'beta' years. What you have is better than fail-safe.I have worked in an engineering capacity for much of my career inside fortune 25 companies. I carried two blackberries, one personal and one corporate. I've replaced them both with an iPhone late last year. More than anything, it remains a joyous decision. As an engineer, I can't help but marvel at the device, just as I did with iPod shuffle once. I think, many people take things for granted, and the sense of 'wow' and 'marvel' are muted on the current generation. Maybe.