

RIM BlackBerry Desperately Working on a Plan to Fend Off the iPhone - vlad
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/technology/27rim.html

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martythemaniak
I worked for RIM in 2005/2006 and the entire time every company under the sun
was coming out with a "BlackBerry Killer". It was supposed to be the Treo,
Good Technology, Moto's Q9, WinMo with active sync, Nokia E60 etc etc. During
the entire time sales kept growing steadily at around 25% a quarter.

So the iPhone is just the latest one of these and things will turn out as
before. For example, sales of the BB have been very strong since the iPhone
launched and even exceeded analyst expectations in Q4 and that's unlikely to
change.

Look at it this way - when the BlackBerry came out in 99, RIM had around 100
poeple and sold 25000 devices. Now they're one of Canada's largest companies
by market cap, have thousands of employees and sell millions of devices per
quarter.

So what I'm really saying is: no worries. They've got plenty of good people
working there, the CxOs are competent and they'll do well.

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mattmaroon
That article confused me. On one hand, Blackberries aren't going to be
replaced among core users by anything that doesn't have a keypad. On the other
hand, RIM is threatened by the iPhone. Which is it?

~~~
tl
RIM is threatened by the iPhone. In spite of statistics showing the iPhone
keyboard to have a much higher error rate, a significant portion of users
don't seem to mind. Besides, the iPhone is the brand new "hey, I'm important"
status symbol replacing the old status symbol (the loving named "crackberry")
of the corporate golfer-businessman.

~~~
vlad
I got some VP's hooked onto the iPhone by making them and the Exchange Team
aware of, and sign up for, the iPhone Enterprise Beta program shortly after I
was accepted as an Individual under my own accord. In January, I presented
some slides with a manager to a bunch of smart people beforehand to bring
attention to the iPhone as a potential platform and a reduced cost option than
the $80-$120/mo crackberries. The point was to get some development for the
platform, but VP's took the iPhones for themselves when the test units came
in, so that's a good sign. One big deal with the iPhones is that several VP's
and Architects I've talked to have large collections of music from way back
when they were younger and listen to them on their iPods, so the iPhone has a
good quality of reminiscence to it. In fact, at a corporate gathering, two of
them were comparing which albums they had standing by a jukebox with tons of
choices. They could be doing the same with the iPhone. One could say that
showing your albums to a friend could be a killer social feature for two
people standing next to each other who are in their forties or fifties. The
BlackBerry keyboard was judged to be better, but I told them to wait a bit as
it learns from the way the user uses it.

There are probably great reasons to present the use of the mac as an option or
to have an Ajax web site for the company's target audience, but I have better
things to do at home. I'm already initiating other crazy things, like teaching
the web content team in IT how to use basic HTML, and how to create simple
banners in Photoshop (don't ask) in the beginning of May. Somebody yell at me.

