RIM has fallen behind big time and they got to innovate fast as they have been leap frogged by Apple and Google. I’m Canadian and sure I want a Canadian technology company to succeed, but that doesn’t mean RIM will because I think they got too comfortable…RIM reminds me of Nortel and it might end up like Nortel if RIM doesn’t swallow its pride. Nortel got so big and popular and they rested on their laurels instead of looking to the future and innovating.
A recent article from Wall Street Journal says RIM has lost 4% of the smartphone market and also is out of the top 5 in smartphone sales, it will erode even more in coming months. I believe this because RIM continues to come out with outdated hardware and stupid ideas like the “Playbook” tablet. Which will cost $499 and only has WI-FI connection. RIM also announced that the 3G version to be released later will cost $830. Hello RIM…wake up call you have “NO APPS” . Either the CEO or the product management team at RIM are a bunch of idiots.
Who in their right mind would pay $499 for a tablet when competitors out there like Android tablets (Samsung Galaxy Tab) and iPads can connect to 3G and Wi-fi too around the the same price and offer thousands of already available software / apps. I am going to have to agree with Steve Jobs here when he says that RIM is going to fail miserably
with the Playbook tablet. RIM was out to lunch when they designed the Playbook using QNX operating system and there is no apps for it and get this your Blackberry OS apps will not even work on it.
Recently, RIM has announced that they will build a piece of software a VM (virtual machine) that will let RIM smartphones and tablets to run Android apps…duh you should have built the whole thing on Android to begin with and when the heck is that going to be ready.
Looking into the future I can see RIM losing market share big time. I work for a large technology corporation in Canada that employs over 2000 people and already iPads and iPhones are showing up in our company smartphone choices and employees are choosing Apple products over BlackBerrys. So with iPads tablets already available to my co-workers and executives why would they choose the Blackberry Playbook, which doesn’t have much software / apps going for it and at the same initial price from Rogers Canada. A lot of our executives are already running around the office with iPads and iPhones.
Add to the fact that Motorola has come out with the Droid Pro Android phone, that has a large multi-touch screen and full QWERTY keyboard which is basically a twin of the BlackBerry Torch 9800 smartphone, but with much better Android OS, browser faster processor and lots of apps. Another big blow to RIM is DELL’s announcement that the whole company will stop issuing RIM BlackBerry phones and instead use DELL’s own Windows Phone 7 or Android smartphones. So you see within a few years if RIM doesn’t get their act together I can see them losing way way more than 15% of their enterprise business.
Add to this that Apple has hired away RIM’s Enterprise Sales executive, so this new hire that used to work for RIM will now be working to get iPhones into corporate accounts…further eroding RIM’s Enterprise business.
Like one of my co-worker said “Todays office workers need a fast smartphone that can do more than just the basic office task, because after office hours they are people too and want software / apps to entertain them as well.”
From a trading perspective I would buy some PUT long term options / LEAPs on RIM-TO to take advantage of the declining share price over the next year or so.
by Das Brain
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