The Killer App

As a fan for a long time of what they do and unabashedly showing some national pride RIM lately makes me very sad. You see they guessed wrong and are now on a downward slide.

Their products are still top notch and they still do corporate email connections that are the most robust and resilient. But it's not enough and these days it's not even the right card to be playing.

Phones morphed - if this is news to anyone the next point may be too freaky to consider. They moved from devices where our communication has broadened from push to pull. Talk to someone on my phone ? Well sure it's possible if you don't want to video conf or announce your proximity seamlessly or browse or play games. (did you know the #1 game platform isn't Xbox or Playstation or Wii, rather it's the iPod Touch).

RIM and the Blackberry suite of devices have been all about the email connection and for a long time as society's comfort level with non-voice uses of phones were developing, we all saw email as the killler app. That served them well, becoming one of the worlds largest five smart phone firms. But as their emergent role seemed firmly in place, other players (Apple, Google) saw fit to change the focus and pushed "apps". Better screens, resolutions and processers and user interfaces made this possible. With limited success at first, this app focus did eventually take off and while RIM has seen this and started to embrace it, in reality they are too late as they didn't move away from their QWERTY email centric devices fast enough. Sure there's a pad in the works, just like a hundred other companies. Sure they have an app store - but it's not a fully functional ecosystem the way the Android or iPhone one is. It's an afterthought to develop for RIM.

Moving forward what's the best path for them ? License out their software approach (for corporate email servers) like Palm did. But where is Palm now ? Continue to push away like Motorola ? (but admittedly that company went way downmarket and RIM may not have the stomach to be a price competitor having focused on value creation until now).

RIM is a victim to a trend that has moved on. So save your Blackberry as a museum piece. You can position it alongside your electronic calendar organizer with that cool stylus pen.