I didn’t get to go to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year, but I did watch RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis explaining RIM’s place in the smartphone world on Youtube. I was reminded of my Dad telling me the “Facts of Life” on a holiday in the south of France when I was twelve.
Like everyone else I had already heard all about sex from friends at school. They made it sound exciting, novel, and essentially all about “me.” Dad made it sound like an onerous responsibility to be borne when I grew up and was married. In businesss-speak, my friends talked about sex from the consumer’s perspective…my Dad from the manufacturer’s.
This is the difference between Steve Jobs and Mike Lazaridis.
While Steve Jobs portrays an exciting new world of infinite promiscuous opportunity on the iPhone, Lazaridis is talking up the data transmitting efficiency of the Blackberry OS. He talks not of apps and photos and fun, but about how we have to conserve limited bandwidth resources and how robust and secure the Blackberry servers are for corporations.
Jobs is all about the consumer (me), and Mike, apparently, is all about the carrier and the corporation (them).
Lazaridis’ presentation is about 20 minutes long and has only been viewed by a few thousand diehards (compared to millions who tune into Apple launches) but he makes some interesting and seemingly very sensible points. For all I know he could well be right in predicting a bandwidth crunch that will make Blackberry a necessity in the marketplace, and he clearly thinks he knows what side his bread is buttered on (his bread has always been buttered by big enterprise and the carriers).
But for the moment, at least, he is backing the wrong horse.
Thanks to the Apple iPhone consumers are driving the train now. The carriers have all cottoned on, and the corporations will inevitably follow.
By rights Blackberry should be doomed, destined to inevitable extinction at some point in the future as the CTOs of the world’s corporations slowly succumb to the urgings of their employees to allow other OSs onto their servers. When Blackberry was the only act in town, and when email was all you used it for, their position seemed impregnable. But the world changed, the internet became the killer app and Blackberry hasn’t really been able to change with it – as countless versions of the ‘Curve’ and the drab Blackberry Web browser have attested to.
Of course Blackberry handsets “do” all the things other smartphones do, it’s just that they don’t do it with the same flair or verve…and that’s the rub. Blackberrys are great email machines, are easy to use, and are still selling in the non-contract arena where they aren’t up against the best new smartphones. Talk of a crossover into the consumer arena is premature, however, and will be killed by the dramatically accelerating adoption of Android by the mainstream.
No amount of Black Eyed Peas sponsorship is going to change that.
Even business users want a bit of multitouch coolness these days. Judging by Lazarids’ presentation in Barcelona, Blackberry’s strategy is to stick to the strict engineering efficiency that has made it so popular with our mobile ‘parents,’ the carriers and the corporations. The need to address the specter of an Apple monopoly has won over the carriers to Android. Pester power will eventually win over the corporations. All Apple and Android have to do is get their phones to handle multiple email accounts properly and they’ll be driving the nail in Blackberry’s coffin.
Blackberry will always be able to claim they were there first, but then again so was the Sony Walkman.
So Wither RIM?
Maybe RIM should partner up with Microsoft. Either through a sale or a joint venture of some sort.
Microsoft shocked the mobile world at MWC by demonstrating a new OS that wasn’t total rubbish (while shooting themselves in the foot by telling us it won’t be available ‘til the fall. Duh!). Microsoft and RIM are natural bedfellows with hooks deep into global enterprise — they are cut from the same cloth.
RIM makes pretty efficient handsets backed up by a solid and respected ecosystem and Microsoft have been beetling away to produce a good OS. Working together they might just be able to pull together a handset with a sexy OS that corporations can pass on to their employees without making them feel ashamed in public.
If they do that there’ll be life in the old dog yet.
At some point there is bound to be consolidation and fall out in the smartphone space and the carriers literally can’t afford to let Apple become too dominant. Hence they’re falling over themselves to release new Android handsets. The consolidation should be good for customers, and for the industry as a whole
If Microsoft and RIM combined then there would be a huge collective sigh of relief in America’s boardrooms and, potentially, some reasonably satisfied users, too.
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