[Hack&Lube]

RIM is dead. It's the next Nortel/Nokia. Once an industry leader, to be totally forgotten.

The problem with RIM is that it's a company full of engineers, hiring more engineers from Waterloo, etc. There are no great idea people, marketers, industrial designers, etc. For years, Blackberries were the ugliest phones in the world without the features that grab the attention of the general public. There's really nothing special about the Blackberry anymore (many alternatives to BBM, many phones with physical keyboards). RIM is basically Apple in the 1990s.

RIM relied on corporations having to buy their proprietary Blackberry enterprise servers and pay for all their support and software and extortion level fees, etc. Corporations have shifted to allowing their employees use what devices they want (ios, android), and using all the cheaper solutions out there with Linux or Microsoft Exchange do everything.

Blackberry is dead meat. There is no way they can recover. Nobody is going to make apps for a 3rd proprietary platform. If you don't have the apps, you can never compete. Doesn't help that they make it almost impossible for anyone to become an app developer. There was a letter from a prospective app developer in Waterloo who complained that to even get the dev kit, he needed to pay $200 and get a public notary to prove his identity. After that, the dev kit had no complete tools, they were just libraries he had to put together himself. If you develop for IOS and Android, you just jump right into it without any barriers.

Blackberry can never compete with IOS and Android in the casual market. They should switch back to focus purely on enterprise and engineering. Maybe they can live off patents and become a patent whore like all those companies that sued RIM over the past decade while holding generic patents.