<story><title>Open letter to BlackBerry bosses: Senior RIM exec tells all as company crumbles</title><url>http://www.bgr.com/2011/06/30/open-letter-to-blackberry-bosses-senior-rim-exec-tells-all-as-company-crumbles-around-him/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>run4yourlives</author><text>I actually think this strategy is a bad one for RIM. You aren&apos;t going to beat Apple at its own game (UX/consumer market), you need to change the dynamics of the engagement.&lt;p&gt;One area that RIM/Blackberry is still king is the enterprise. Apple hasn&apos;t even attempted to enter this market, for good reason.&lt;p&gt;I think a viable - although controversial - strategy would be to simplify the offering and the company into a provider of enterprise communications devices. Beef up BES based on customer feedback, pull all blackberries from consumer shelves (i.e. Joe public can&apos;t buy one), focus on owning the market for devices with large organizations that provide phones to their staff as a cost of business. Expand into high security, high risk areas like the military and government (Obama doesn&apos;t have an iPhone, does he?).&lt;p&gt;This would also have the effect making owning a blackberry a sign that you are an &quot;elite member of a large group that can afford them&quot;, like it was in the later 90&apos;s. Owning a blackberry has no cache anymore, because any 16 year old can go buy a pink curve and look as cool as you do.&lt;p&gt;This is the exact opposite of what this exec is looking for, but in the end will make for a stronger (although smaller) RIM, I believe.&lt;p&gt;The strategy suggested by the exec is a recipe for disaster.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dpark</author><text>Artificially restricting themselves to only corporate and government users would be a terrible move.  They would still bear nearly 100% of their current costs, but have access to maybe 10 or 20% of their current market.  This is a recipe for disaster.  Being &quot;corp and govt only&quot; has no meaningful exclusivity.  It&apos;s not elite.  It&apos;s just bureaucratic.  No one lusts after overpriced government-contract devices.  And certainly very few people want to carry both a corporate and a personal phone.  Those who do will probably like the Blackberry less, as it becomes a symbol of inconvenience, and as it&apos;s constantly compared to their latest iOS/Android device&lt;p&gt;History has shown that general-use technology eventually wins over niche technology.  How many companies are running Alpha chips these days?  SGI workstations?  Sparc servers?  The niche players lost as the mainstream passed them by.  Intel processors ended up crushing the dedicated &quot;corporate&quot; processors, because the mainstream market could support larger R&amp;#38;D efforts and provided a volume that allowed a far superior price/performance ratio.  Ditto with nVidia.  This is a story that&apos;s played out the same way again and again.  The niche player loses unless it can deliver (and continue to deliver) significant value beyond what the mainstream players can provide.  No one cares if there&apos;s an &quot;elite&quot; status to owning a rack of Alpha processors when a rack of Pentium 3 chips can do the same job for a quarter of the price.&lt;p&gt;Also, Apple and Android are both making significant headway into the corporate environment, as employees tire of carrying two phones or being limited to a Blackberry device.  Even in companies where Blackberry is the only &quot;supported&quot; device, they often give employees access to Exchange on their personal devices.  If employees use their personal iPhones rather than receive a corp-provided Blackberry, that&apos;s a loss for RIM (and arguably a gain for the corporation, as they don&apos;t have to pick up the tab for another corp phone).</text></comment>
<story><title>Open letter to BlackBerry bosses: Senior RIM exec tells all as company crumbles</title><url>http://www.bgr.com/2011/06/30/open-letter-to-blackberry-bosses-senior-rim-exec-tells-all-as-company-crumbles-around-him/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>run4yourlives</author><text>I actually think this strategy is a bad one for RIM. You aren&apos;t going to beat Apple at its own game (UX/consumer market), you need to change the dynamics of the engagement.&lt;p&gt;One area that RIM/Blackberry is still king is the enterprise. Apple hasn&apos;t even attempted to enter this market, for good reason.&lt;p&gt;I think a viable - although controversial - strategy would be to simplify the offering and the company into a provider of enterprise communications devices. Beef up BES based on customer feedback, pull all blackberries from consumer shelves (i.e. Joe public can&apos;t buy one), focus on owning the market for devices with large organizations that provide phones to their staff as a cost of business. Expand into high security, high risk areas like the military and government (Obama doesn&apos;t have an iPhone, does he?).&lt;p&gt;This would also have the effect making owning a blackberry a sign that you are an &quot;elite member of a large group that can afford them&quot;, like it was in the later 90&apos;s. Owning a blackberry has no cache anymore, because any 16 year old can go buy a pink curve and look as cool as you do.&lt;p&gt;This is the exact opposite of what this exec is looking for, but in the end will make for a stronger (although smaller) RIM, I believe.&lt;p&gt;The strategy suggested by the exec is a recipe for disaster.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>elehack</author><text>Focusing on professional-only also has substantial difficulties.  Will employees want to carry 2 phones, or will they want to be able to use their consumer smartphone for business as well?  If they had and learned an iPhone or Android device, will they want to learn a new platform for their business phone, or will they prefer to use one like they already know?</text></comment>