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Flatlining User Base May Spell End of RIM
Meshach writes "There is an article in the Globe and Mail that says that the user base for Blackberry has stopped growing for the first time in the company's history, and speculates that this is the beginning of the end of RIM. The main problem seems to be that RIM's new Blackberry models like the Bold and Torch are selling poorly, and their production costs are much higher than other products manufactured in China. A recent research report says that after BB10 the company will need to sell or drastically change its business model."
RIM's main problem is that enterprise companies have started moving away from the platform. People don't want to carry around several smart phones and are much more eager to choose either iPhone or WP7 phones. Microsoft is known for being the office centric company and therefore has fantastic support for Exchange server and office apps. RIM lost the audience it had when Windows Phones were introduced (while Windows Mobile also had many work users, WP was a major improvement).
RIM basically lost all of its advantages to iPhone (home users) and Windows Phone's (work users). The only place I still see some Blackberries is the university students in Bangkok, Thailand (crazy adventures there, let me tell you).
they are just not needed anymore...
Just like os\2, palM, winmo, kin, winpho, ugly betty, all once mine. Rim is fine until I get one then it's curtains for sure.
THIS is the beginning of the end of RIM?
It began a long time ago...
1. Use Android
2. Enhance security; add exclusive BB apps.
3. Profit
No, no ??? needed. Just go straight to profit.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
Why certain companies don't just die quickly, instead of going through long pains.
Is there any doubt still, that RIM is dead?
Heck, it was dead 5 years ago.
I was just contacted by a RIM recruiter through a certain job site. (Of course it involves moving to Canada.)
"AndroidLover" really needed to insert that Microsoft compliment on an RIM article.. and on your first post ever.. and your the first to reply. nicely done troll.
1. Buy RIM for $10B
2. Sit on technologies for 3 years
3. ???
4. Sell what's left for 75 million
5. Profit!
Alternatively RIM has all but stopped creating new legacy phones, and anyone who *is* interested (at least in the north american market) is pretty much waiting for BB10 devices at this point.
Financials are out this week; it'll be interesting to see if global growth did actually stop.
RIM has needed a bit of restructuring for some time. I remember reading an open letter a while back from one of the upper middle unit managers a while back -you may recall it as well. It seems like the corporate culture is directionless and myopic, as well as a bit disorganized. I think RIM and Blackberry can survive but they have to shake the "that's so 2004" shadow. Apple did it after a long slump, but they did it by really innovating, not merely copying too many years too late.
since when is stagnation the beginning of the end? We have saturation and the mobile market become more and more an upgrade game.
Wanting to save some money, I got a Blackberry, instead of an iPhone or Android. It was a stupid mistake. The phone's quality is sub-par (I had to send it off to be repaired after the screen snapped under the pressure of my thumb, from picking it up). The menus are complicated and convoluted; nothing is where you'd think it should be and somethings need to be adjusted from several different locations (and I'm good with menus. I work with computers all day). On top of all of that, the audio, on my phone model anyway, is terrible. It's muffled and hard to hear. As soon as my commitment on this phone runs out, I am ditching this thing and never looking back.
Hire Carly?
..don't panic
The only reason I bought (well it was actually a free upgrade) my curve was it was one of the few remaining phones with a physical keyboard.
May spell the end of RIM?? MAY??? Seriously, are people not paying attention?? RIM has been in a death spiral for about two years now. Their failure to recognize the impact the iPhone was going to have on the entire smartphone industry and their refusal to adapt to that change once it was undeniable already spelled the end of RIM. We're just now working through any residual momentum they have left before they either completely collapse under their own weight or sell off their assets and effectively vanish. RIM is done and has been for a long while. Anyone who's paid even a hint of attention to the industry has known this for a while.
And, yes, I know many people love Blackberrys and many people hate virtual keyboards and many people think that RIM is the pinnacle of mobile security and neither iOS nor Android can touch it but, sorry, you're in the minority now and your darling company is dead. Accept it. Everyone else has.
Atari computers, back in the early 1980s, showed us the problem of rolling your own hardware, operating system, and software.
Any change you need to make will be (a) huge (b) require 400 internal departments to agree and (c) baffle users.
My suggestion for RIM: just go ahead and fire 2/3 of management and consolidate 2/3 of your internal teams. Then focus on using as much open source hardware and software as you can to reduce costs.
If they start doing this today, they might be able to save themselves from Chapter 11 by Christmas.
Well I for one recently bought my very first Blackberry device (a 64-Gb Playbook, when the prices fell) for a very simple and clear reason: I want to stay out of Apple/Google duopoly.
I have been waiting for a linux tablet for a couple of years; now I feared to really turn too old before they come (I swear, I'll buy one anyhow).
While I am a bit pissed off by the ultraserious security and obviously definitive user-won't-ever-be-root feature, I find it has some positive side effects (you can lose the machine: nobody will access your data, and just buy another, all your bought applications are back).
Above all, I discover something I just didn't expect: concerning software availability, it indeed has reached, for me, the minimum level of 'floatability': various browsers of which one features adblocking, honest offline RSS viewers, a port of the Android Eye-fi receiver that does backup all my DSLR photos in the minutes I take them, young but reasonable file managers handling ftp and all your cloudy private equivalents, offline wikipedias...
So, yes, last year's Blackberry tablet is indeed bearable, for me. And does not belong to a monopoly.
I fully understand, to devs it's obviously more interesting financially to work for Apple or Android.
It's just I'm really concerned about monopolies, I suffered from some personally, and it's something I still cannot describe easily, and wouldn't wish to my worst enemy.
Herve S.
If sales of blackberries are really flat lining due to market saturation does this mean next week we will be seeing headlines claiming we live in a post-mobile world?
Have stuck it out long enough. I don't even mind the lack of apps, it's the lack of even halfway decent web access that is the killer for me. Contract ends in December, time to move on
1) Meet Deadlines!
2) Make good software!
3) Follow trends and don't attempt to set them!
If Rim just got there act together and started running like a mature company and not a cutting edge start up then they might be able to turn around.
...it's purely down to being that everyone who *wants* a Blackberry *has* a Blackberry.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
RIM is already dead and is no longer worth even posting to /.
The carcas may still have some warmth but there is no hope for revival now. There are reasons why some humans tend to hang on to things during times of mourning but it does not change the cold fact that the world has moved on.
Please consider posting ropics relevant to 2012.
I've never seen so many Playbooks sold as we have recently. Why? Because the price is rock bottom. This IS the end of RIM in its current guise.
Do you see what I did there?
That's 3% shipped, not sold. They'll often talk about shipped units to make the numbers bigger, but actual sold units is an even smaller number. It's a phone no one wants.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
...anyone with a brain could tell you RIM was finished years ago. If you buy a blackberry you are retarded.
A secure, carrier-independent global network with ridiculously configurable security policies for corporate use (via BES). That's what RIM should be banking on, and let other companies develop RIM-network smartphones for them. But it seems like too little too late though, despite the major internal progress they've made in the past year, they held onto their two stubborn CEO-duo for way too long.
QNX/BB10 has the potential to be the best ever mobile phone OS. Of course that means close to naught in regards market-share in the tech world.
In other words, a fragile single-point-of-failure. We already know how many times that worked out.
RIM is doing a terrible job of marketing the bold and torch, which are both really good phones. They don't have them particularly widely available - and perhaps even worse, well advertised - in the US. Ask an average US consumer if they've heard of an iPhone, they'll answer yes. Heard of an android smart phone, they'll answer yes as well. Heard of a blackberry torch, they'll likely say no.
If they want to expand their user base, they should try selling phones directly to users. It works well for Apple, there is no reason why it couldn't work well for RIM as well. They don't even need to open their own stores, they could sell them through best buy, target, walmart, radio shack, etc. Sell unlocked phones with manufacturer warranties, there is a market for that if they can hit a reasonable price point and free consumers from having to sign 2-year contracts to buy a new phone.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
If you're going on actual history instead of magic pixie dusted history, their network hasn't gone down completely, ever. There have been a few largely-covered outages (largest being one of their primary datacentres in Eurpoe last year), but how many times has your carrier's data network failed this year?
What sort of corporate security infrastructure does any carrier have available for their devices, other than leaning on the RIM network through BIS? There's a lot more to corporate smartphone policy than being able to run TrueCrypt on your SD card.
(For the record, I own an Galaxy S3).
Wasn't there a story not so long back about how India is one of the few markets RIM is still thriving? In India, while people pick up quickly Western technology trends, they are not so fast in leaving it. Right now, Blackberries are one of the leading phones there, and that market's not going away. So if RIM disappears elsewhere, they may end up becoming a purely Indian mobile company, similar to Karbonn or Micromaxx.
To be honest, RIM and Blackberries aren't really that great and RIM has an antiquated and silly setup. The sooner they are gone the better.
It's not hugely difficult to port apps to the Playbook [...] but not many devs bother
A developer can't very well port an application to a device that he doesn't have.
and those that do stick a premium on to cover their efforts.
How much of that premium is to cover the cost of buying a PlayBook on which to test?
He said it the best two years ago.
http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2010/10/whats-really-wrong-with-blackberry-and.html
Your troll is based on skipping Android phones which are actually far more popular then WP7.
Android phones won't stay popular in the home country of Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Slashdot if Apple keeps winning in patent court.
I'm still really liking my bold only as it has hard keys my large hands can use, yet still has a touch screen. Not much more to like tho, even if I am a luddite. Recommendations for the latest android but with hard keys ? any thoughts from others who've switched from bberry keyboard to a touch screen ?
I figured they would have been losing huge numbers of users for the last 1-2 years.
The growth of the user base is flattening, not flatlining. It's RIM itself that is flatlining.
that it so. Oh, to get rid of this CrackBerry that I'm saddled with from the company.
G&M has a consistent history of publishing anti-RIM and anti-BlackBerry stories; try National Post for a more balanced perspective from North of the border. Even if it was true that the RIM user base has plateaud out (which I don't see how G&M could possibly know for certain) it would be consistent with most of the fans waiting for BB10. So basically this is a non-story and a non-issue.
You can't run a company when every year someone successfully sues you for hundreds of millions of dollars over and over and over. I'm kind of hoping Apple does that no only to Samsung but to everyone everywhere and the whole cell phone market including all the carriers go under and we go back 30 or 40 years in terms of technology.
they just need to make a 5 inch quad-core android phone and it will take them back to where they need to be
Really guys-RIM is not supporting the current users. OSX with Desktop Manager. Updated to 2.4. Suddenly, the machine hangs, won't synch, needs forced restarts. The Desktop MisManager is the only bit of software that has ever hung my Mac, running 10.6. Oh, and the Bluetooth in the Bold 9930 kept dropping out in the car. Are we pissed yet ? Go to Verizon. They replace the Bold, even though I am out of warranty. New Bold still won't synch calendar or contacts. Useless. Search forums. All have this issue. RIM knows. "No Projected Resolution" Are you kidding me ? Business user can't synch, forget music or media.....and you aren't on it...? Forums full of this...OSX can't synch, and prior versions of OSX software are not on the RIM website. I finally found 2.1 from August 2011. A downgrade, along with unchecking every upgrade notifier, fixed the problem. Every person I asked, said the same thing, and had the same suggestion...."Get an iPhone". I prefer the keyboard on the BB, but my Palm under XP had no problems synching, so I don't expect you to, either. Will I care about system 10 when it comes out ? Maybe I'll read about it on my iPhone-and I don't really want one.
All RIM has to do is come out with a smart phone to compete with the iPhone and the Samsung S3... Stop trying to just be a blackberry, it is not as "nifty" as it used to be ...
Wes Beckwith
This is the begininng of the end for RIM? Yeah, that might've been poignant what, 4? 5? Years ago. They were like a dinosaur standing on a big block of wood...on top of a tar pit. It was just a matter of time without a miracle, and from the looks of it, they haven't even been praying.
I don't know if it's fair to say BB is done but I'm sure seeing a lot fewer of them these days. At a place I used to work at I got issued a BB and I've got to say that I really liked it. The battery would last forever it seemed. The phone calls came in loud and clear. It was great for texting and email. It was secure. I really liked the physical keyboard. But they were slow to adopt the touch screen interface and now seem dated compared to the iPhone and Android phones.
:-(
No more rim jobs.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Since when did the fact that a company's user base stopped growing mean it was the beginning of the end for them?
In any normal (non-tech) business, as long as you are making decent profits your company is successful. You don't suddenly panic and close down if one year your sales figures don't increase. I've worked for engineering firms that have been going for fifty or more years; they may be smaller than when they were at their peak and outsource a lot of manufacturing to China, but they're still happily profitable.
The myth that someone like Apple can keep on growing for ever is...a myth.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
All RIM needs to do is release the BB10 devices already. I'll buy one. I know many people who'll buy one. But there isn't one to buy, and the fact that it's "coming" is the main reason why existing (read - obsolete) models aren't being purchased. Why would I spend $500 on the 9900, if I know there will be a new one in under 6 months? If I wanted to spend $500 on a new phone every 6 months, I would switch to iPhones long time ago.
Bow before me, for I am root.