They own an ecosystem that is closed that they control and they control phone designs…On the ecosystem front, they need to outdo the expanding android ecosystem and the saturating iphone ecosystem.
On the phone front, they have to compete with the Koreans and Taiwanese companies on the high end smartphone markets, which will absolutely crush the high end markets. And the Chinese companies are going to crush the lower end markets by offering smartphone at price points of was-feature-phones…
I think the only company that will reasonably emerge from this carnage is MMI, because overall they caught onto the android bandwagon early on….
Several of the corporate users I’ve known have already switched over to Android to access their corporate emails….
Android is becoming a very interesting ecosystem…Now extending beyond phones and tablets….It’s going to be part of Google TV as well….
And I love Google’s music cloud service.
That said, I’m covering Rimm as soon as I can…Because I wouldn’t be surprised to see some creative deals, like a private equity deal….
I’m sure folks that bought into Nokia, Nortel, Lucent US Robotics/Palm didn’t ever think that those would be nearly worthless companies today…..
Also, when in doubt, just follow what developers are doing (or not doing…)…Watch the mass exodus from the developer community…
Seesmic will stop making its BlackBerry Twitter app at the end of June, the company said in a blog post.
Seesmic says it wants to focus development on its most popular mobile platforms: iOS, Android and — ouch — Windows Phone. It’s also going to keep working on its Web and desktop apps.
This matches what a lot of other mobile developers have been quietly saying for the last few months — they have to focus on the platforms with the most users, and they have no confidence that the BlackBerry will be a top platform in the coming years.
RIM’s horrible earnings report last week probably didn’t inspire a lot of confidence. Its transition to a new operating system is also a stumbling block — why keep developing for the current platform if you have no idea how long it will be around?
We’ve talked to other mobile developers who are considering the same move. If it becomes a stampede, this could send the BlackBerry into a downward spiral — fewer apps mean fewer customers mean less interest from developers, and so on.
