Apple's iPhone 5 expected to 'steamroll' RIM's BlackBerry 7 phones

So who's gonna buy RIM?

Sounds to me like Google might try.

I think Apple certainly aught to.

I wish Apple would just release the iPhone 5 already..... getting seriously tired of waiting!

I second the idea that Apple might want to buy Rim, although might as well wait another couple of quarters so that their value halves.

Nah, Google is buying Motorola. Even Google's smart enough to know that picking up another handset company would make integration really challenging. Google will have its hands full just trying to integrate Motorola. Their company cultures are really far apart and I suspect the acquisition will not go well.

Apart from any patent portfolio, RIM has very little of value to Apple.

RIM would garner more interest from someone with no presence in telephony (e.g., Dell, Acer) or another handset manufacturer that has no presence in North America or on the high end (some of the Chinese manufacturers would qualify here).

As a Canadian I feel sad about this. It seems like it's been a never ending stream of great companies - Corel, ATI, Nortel, and now RIM that reach a certain level of success and then get gobbled up by the American behemoths down south.

I use an iPhone at work, mostly because our President wanted one and I had to support it - but 99% of our users run Blackberry's. I honestly think Blackberry's are a better product in the corporate world, but as we all know Apple is the media darling so gets all the headlines and therefore mindshare.

RIM isn't going anywhere anytime soon. They are still heavy in the enterprise market. Maybe they spin off their consumer market.

Buy RIM for what? To own a line of smart phones that are basically, obsolete? RIM will just fall by the wayside much faster than we think.

Seems to me that RIM has just about reached that tipping point where millions upon millions of smart phone buyers are independently but simultaneously deciding that they're not getting a Blackberry for their next phone. That's how sales collapses happen, first you see a gradual erosion of demand and you project that into the future thinking there's enough time for the mfr to fix things, then people notice that their friends and relatives aren't buying the product anymore and they decide they'll follow suit then BAM! the gradual erosion turns into a downward spiral.

When the iPhone first came out, I said RIMM is already dead they just don't know it yet. They're starting to know.

More than any other smart phone manufacturer, RIM had their chance. With absolutely no vision at the top they failed to innovate. Death soon follows when blood stops being pumped to the brain.

One more year and they are gone. iPhone 5 will bury them. Last year I thought they might have 3 years left but, sadly, their ship is almost at a 90 degree angle in the water.

Is the enterprise market big enough to generate profits that can fund the kind of R&D that RIM needs to keep up with Apple, Google & (maybe) Microsoft? Remember, RIMs problems are rooted in their failure to keep pace with the rival smart phones' technology.

That's the great unknown.

Its strange to me how the Apple detractors always seem to come out with the line that Apple is successful because the media love them - implying the consumers are sheep who simply do what the media tell them to.

The question that these people have to answer is why is Apple the media darling (assuming that it is)?

Apple doesn't have consumer mindshare because it is the media darling, it is the media darling because it has consumer mindshare

This is the kind of thinking that has destroyed RIM's ability to compete. Apple's success with the iPhone and iPad is not due to their being "the media darling", but rather due to their re-inventing how people communicate and compute in their daily lives, their personal and business lives.

What RIM has done is this:

a. Mock every new innovation from Apple and others, then…
b. Rush a "me too" device, poorly implemented, out the door, then…
c. Boast of upcoming products and how awesome they will be, but…
d. The boasts are always based on engineering specs, "feeds and speeds" as Steve Jobs said, about which consumers care not at all, and…
e. Fail to deliver those in a timely fashion.

That RIM's frantic efforts to mislead and misdirect the press regarding their finances and prospects, does not help, either.

Physical keyboards and secure, proprietary (and expensive) messaging did not stave off the decline, and they will not reverse it. They have nothing else to offer, at all.

QNX will not reverse the slide, for the simple reason that no one cares what kernel their phone uses, only the quality of the ecosystem, and RIM has no track record of creating a compelling ecosystem.

The bald truth is this: RIM is a phone company aspiring to compete with computer companies. They have no experience looking back, and no vision looking forward.

What a pointless news story. I notice you didn't bother to add anything about Android 'steamrolling' iOS, as it will inevitably continue to do.

RIM's current predicament is a result of being dumped by the enterprise. Their only growth was coming from new markets (read: the consumer market in Asia). They're now so screwed on their home turf that moving into new markets can't help them. So, no, they're not still heavy in the enterprise market.

Apple could merge iMessage with BBM. That would handily stable RIM's one trick pony into the Apple barn.

No one stays on top forever. The mighty fall at last. All of them.

Are you KIDDING ME?!

Buy them FOR THE PATENTS.

Google doesn't need RIM and Apple's technology stack is completely different than RIM's. In addition to that RIM is catering to corporate market, where end users have phones shoved down their throats weather they like them or not (this is also why RIM is unprepared to compete in the consumer market, they never had to make a phone and OS that are usable, with low tech support needs).

RIM has strong Microsoft culture, their enterprise department is almost like subsidiary of Microsoft (heavily in MS technology stack, with open hostility towards any technologies/programming languages that don't come from Redmond). And even the mobile group is clamoring to develop mobile BB apps in C# rather than Java.

However, the reality is that up to now RIM has had a lot of investment into Java, but that is changing with QNX acquisition. So, it would make more sense for Microsoft to buy RIM, considering Microsoft wants to fight for the third place in the mobile world (according to what we heard recently during Window 8 announcements), which RIM currently occupies. At the current stock price, RIM is a bargain.

I'm not sure if Android is steamrolling iOS or not. However, what I am sure of is that there is no single handset manufacturer steamrolling iPhones.

Remember iOS is iPhone + IPad + iPod Touch + AppleTV. If you're going to compare operating systems, you need all the devices that run it. If you're going to compare handset manufacturers, you look at handsets.

My wife just started a new job 6 weeks ago working in corporate HR at a Fortune 100 company. Her previous job was also at a Fortune 100 company (also corporate). At both companies she was given a Blackberry as were all of her peers. The trend lately has been that she, along with several of her co-workers opt to use Good for Enterprise to access their corporate email from their iDevices.

Just this week she made a comment to me that the only reason she carries around her Blackberry at all is in case she has someone call her on it and she needs to answer. Otherwise she doesn't like to use it. She finds it clunky, slow and somewhat awkward. Keep in mind she had been using a Blackberry for years before she got her first iPhone, she was used to using them.

I realize I'm using my wife as the example but several of her peers are doing the same thing. And, it seems, once they switch there is no desire to turn back. She recently convinced a coworker to try out Good on her iPad. She was slightly reluctant at first but now loves it.

To me this all looks bad for Blackberry even in the corporate world, where they got their start in the first place.

Every Canadian feels sad about how the US constantly dominates us in the business markets (even though we are in far better shape economically) but your list is incorrect.

You are blending four companies on a list that all had different reasons for their demise.

Corel was most certainly "gobbled up" by the US and destroyed by the tactics of companies like Adobe, but their product was substandard at best. The only reason to keep it around was the whole anti-competition thing (which seems like it would have been a great move in hindsight, since Adobe now rules all). The fact is however, that Capitalism has no real mechanisms for "fair" competition built in to it, and that this is just the way of the world today. ATI was the victim of similar anti-competitive behaviour and mergers as well.

Nortel's huge market value was acquired almost exclusively through the same process of mergers and dubious behaviour that sunk Corel and ATI, but this time, Nortel was the one taking the smaller companies to the cleaners and absorbing them. Nortel ultimately failed, but primarily because of internal corruption and it had nothing to do with the USA.

RIM's failure is the least controversial and most obvious of all. They simply failed to adapt to a changing market by producing a competing product. They ignored all warnings to that effect until it was too late, then they finally came up with products that were just not that good. There is nothing underhanded about this at all.

So while there *is* a lot of anti-competitive head-butting and absorbing of other companies going on, it happens on both sides of the border and doesn't really explain the demise of RIM at all.

Normally I'd agree with you, but we have a number of enterprise clients who are abandoning the practice of purchasing Blackberry devices for their employees and allowing them to bring their own. Overwhelmingly, they have iPhones. This is a cost saving for the enterprise when looking to reduce overhead.

Apple might gain a lot if they bought RIM, just for patents. RIM also has a lot of business and enterprise features that will make it much easier to implement into iOS.

It's really amazing to see 360degrees turn from 5 years ago. Now all companies that were kings of smartphones are disappearing.

Yeesh, I always wonder what they pay these guys who put out the most obvious "news". I think any faithful reader of this site to come up with the same thing reading comments buried in postings here, yet this mug gets paid to act original.
What a world.

It's not R&D money that's at issue.

Apple spends less on R&D as a percentage than all other companies in the smartphone business by a very large margin. Apple's people are actually just smarter and more creative.

There are many companies out there (esp. military and government contractors and pharma companies), that spend enormous amounts of money on R&D with essentially no results. The reason in the military and government cases is because R&D is a rabbit hole in the budget down which much corruption flows. The reason in the case of the pharma companies is that it allows them to grossly inflate the cost of their products because they can claim to be "paying off" the giant R&D funds from the previous budgetary years.

R&D budgets, especially outside of the hard tech industries, often operate (in fact most always do), as giant slush funds for the companies in question. This works because there is no accountability on such budgets, and there is literally no downside at all if you can roll the cost into the product without anyone choking.

This is partly why a bottle of aspirin who's chemical formula hasn't changed for a hundred years and costs five cents to manufacture, costs $5.95.

Android will steamroll all over iOS just after it is done steamrolling all over Android manufacturers, and Google.

Honestly, no one is getting hurt by Android more than people who are invested in it. Google just spent over 8Bn (ex-cash) buying a loss making company, spent many other billions buying patents from IBM, and will probably end up paying Oracle a ton more after that lawsuit is settled, all to protect hasty decisions made while creating Android.

Samsung, HTC, etc. will keep alternating between losses/profits as they compete with each other in an inevitable race to the bottom, since they have nothing to differentiate with.

There are a few of those WOW events in consumer computing history I recall vividly, such as hearing recognizable speech come from a computer (rather than beep), seeing a photo quality picture on a computer screen (Mac II), and sending email while sitting at a soccer field using a Blackberry (so cool!).
These are all common now. Blackberry has brought some great ideas and products to the corporate world. It is a shame to see them fall.

Not that I'm giving up my iPhone for a Blackberry!

'Sounds'?

who is making such sounds?

What would RIM bring to GOOG's table?
Motorola Mobility is at least 'just' a HW vendor with patents.
BB brings the headaches of supporting a waning enterprise business support model, and a crapload of dissatisifed consumers.

Why would anyone buy RIMM... no great technology, and a customer base that is quite willing to migrate off the platform to others as soon as their contracts are up.

BBM is so poorly designed that RIM couldnt merge it into one of their OWN products (the Playbook). I don't think iMessage and BBM will even get a first date.

+1

The only enterprise value of RIM was BES. Once corps start realizing that they can stop making enterprise email the only place to

Now, for security BES/BB is pretty solid, but for most corps, email security (contents, not auth) is a minor issue. Given that you can VPN from an iPhone and/or build up Citrix VM access, most of these issues are becoming moot (why worry about in-app encryption, esp. on an iPhone, when you can just push your users to your corp network for really secure stuff).

Sharepoint and equivs will further obviate BB. my consulting corp uses it to great advantage. pop a file in the the share, automatically notifications go out to the team. having a poor browser/app or the requirement of BES in SMBs will drive most people to a iPhone/Android device.

Not that I recommend Android for Business, unless the business _owns_ the device, which defeats the purpose...

Then what?????? Now you have their patents...Then what!! Now you have a dying company with competing products that you have now.....so next step????

Seriously, are you people joking?

You immediately shut the company down. Absorb the patents, absorb any talent, everything else is discontinued.

Apple cannot announce the new iPhone and iPod Touch until after Sept. 20 when the Back to school promotion expires.

Also, I believe they will not announce until they have a real lock down on iOS - i.e. it passes the SQA Department.

HA! And in other breaking news, the Honda Civic is expected to "steamroll" the new Fiat in domestic US sales. OF COURSE the iPhone is going to kill anyone that goes up against it. You have basically one top of the line product running a very solid iOS versus 18 kajillion Android/Mango/whatever else products that all look and are named something so similar no one can decipher heads from tails. I pay attention to phones and I couldn't tell you what is a new Andriod phone and which is last years model, or what each one is good at.

That is why I think a lot of people but the iPhone. It is ONE phone running ONE op system. If you have a question about how to do something, you can find help easily. None of this "well I also have an HTC phone, but to get there on my phone you go under sub menu 18...blah blah blah".

Wow! I can't believe you wrote that....Just kill RIM because you got their patents and force thousands of people to lose their jobs!!! Man you are whats wrong with corporate america...

LOL, you really think that?

So all the times that Apple announced new iPods before the BTS promotion ended in the U.K.… just didn't happen then, huh? And I suppose Apple DIDN'T honor the promotion and DIDN'T give people the new models for free.

Guess that just didn't happen.

And you also seem to have forgotten that the BTS promotion has NOTHING TO DO with the iPods this year, so your point is even more meaningless.


Hey, I said absorb the talent. Keep the people that matter. It's not like they'll keep having their jobs in a year anyway. RIM's bleeding chips.

If you believe that the reason Apple is so popular is because of it's media darling status, you're in as much denial as Lazaridis. Being the media darling is the result not the cause. Apple makes great products and that it the real cause.

You don't just become the media darling out of thin air, you have to have a story to tell. I used probably 5 blackberries in my life and it was good for what it was...... But RIM was a laurel rester, they became complacent and when they were challenged, the results were inevitable.

They did not move fast enough when they were on top; no product diversification, very little innovation and did not pursue the consumer market as aggressively!

i see your point but in my experience in a situation such as this, you don't want to spend more money than you have to, and if RIM is indeed going down, then you wait until they go bankrupt and then buy their assets in BK court. Others may try to buy before that, but again, in my experience, it would be foolish and irresponsible to throw a couple more million or even billion at a company to get the patents, when you could have them for pennies on the dollar in court.

JMHO.

And if you're going to absorb talent, why not poach them beforehand? Their contracts are not tied to whether the company is bought or not. If they don't like Apple, they can just quit. There's no guarantee they will be "absorbed"

It would be far more advantageous to get the talent on a onesie twosie basis of a salary, plus benefits, than spend billions to buy a company to find out who they are and then negotiate and maybe get them to come to Cupertino. Doesn't make sense.