Actually there's no conclusive proof that Android is taking sales from RIM, it may very well be Apple who is. What we do know is that Android is rapidly taking sales from dumb-phones and old legacy smartphone systems like Bada, Symbian etc.
Short of a detailed retail survey that asks customers what they're switching from, to and why all we know are snapshots of the market.
Again I'm gonna link the US comscore results. Notice that Jan->Apr RIM lost handset share in the US but only as much as Samsung lost too. Motorola lost more. So the 'Android is killing RIM story' is plausibly false in the US at least.
People need to stop obsessing about smartphone market share and go back to looking at handset market share.
I think the results are pretty clear. RIM, M$ and Palm all down. Most of their customers are sucked up by Google, who grew 5.2.
Apple grew only 1.3, and they had a much smaller share to begin with. Don't get me wrong - Apple is clearly winning because they have better hardware and the OS is not fragmented and they have billions of apps.
But Google seems to be sucking up lots of (temporary) customers. And RIM is losing customers. Apple is holding steady with its installed base - they are actually growing a little bit, the only one besides Google.
Microsoft might as well just give up, and HP is crazy if they think that Palm is anything special. Sure - the vast majority of people are now choosing craptastic Android because they are so cheap. And they like to steal software or they are geeks. Or they just plain hate Apple.
But most people love Apple, and developers know that they can't ever make any money off of Android, so the new Android software is drying up, and Apple's growth is pretty much assured.
.All the Android phones are just plastic crap shoveled out in a desperate "me too" style and given away for cheap or free, just so the one trick pony can brag about how fast they grow.
But they aren't making any money. Android is just going to dry up and blow away when iOS 5 is released.
I think the results are pretty clear. RIM, M$ and Palm all down. Most of their customers are sucked up by Google, who grew 5.2.
Again I repeat - you are looking at the wrong numbers, you are looking at the smartphone share and you should be looking at the handset share. Android is rapidly winning out over dumb-phones and is driving huge numbers of consumers into the smartphone segment, but that's not the same thing as driving consumers off their old smartphones onto Android.
Suppose tomorrow everybody with a dumb-phone got handed a free android smartphone. That would give android a HUGE increase in their share, and RIM a commensurate decrease in the smartphone share but would it have any impact on RIM's business - no it wouldn't.
One last time in the hope that it gets through - stop looking at smartphone share, look at total handset share.
Hmmm....Mac OS X, a stable desktop OS in use for the past 10 years, based on a rock solid BSD platform that has been refined for more than 30 years can learn from QNX, an embedded OS that has never seen a day in a desktop?
I thought you could buy QNX for Intel machines? It's been around, but it's incomplete for smart phone/tablet use. It needs a modern GUI and programming library. Stuff that Apple adapted from Mac OS X.
As I said before, I think RIM is gonna do just fine because of enterprise users. Sure iPhone now offers the same or even better features, but BB is still a status symbol for a business professional. Therefore, they can stop innovating and there would still be millions of sales in the medium term. I think just like MS RIM can have products be very late to market, and people would still buy them out of habit and because they are "good for business customers".
Sure the stock might take a plunge, but the company won't shut down and will just operate with a lower market cap.
[...] Waiting for the QNX operating system to make it to RIM's smartphone is "like waiting for Godot," Wolf said. [...]
It's almost like the Osborne Effect. Pre-announce a product far better than your current product, then watch your sales drop while customers wait for the new product to be released.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AppleInsider
[...] As for the PlayBook and its 500,000 units shipped, RIM did not provide any details on the actual sell-through. [...]
Here we go again with the "shipped" vs. "sold" numbers. It's easy to ship 500k units "quite smoothly." There are lots of big warehouses out there in the supply chain. But selling to actual customers, who pay money for the products, is a different thing entirely.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AppleInsider
[...] White believes that could be a concern for the company in its August quarter, and he does not see the PlayBook making a dent in Apple's iPad sales. [...]
It's been said before, but I'll say it again. There is no "media tablet" market. There is only the iPad market.
I think RIM could actually be an acquisition target for Apple. ... The real question is whether it'd be worth the cost. RIM has a market cap of $14 billion. Is their customer base worth $14 billion? At this point, in terms of acquisition, I think RIM's OS, hardware and most of its talent is essentially worthless. So any company would only be paying for their enterprise customers and solutions. $14 billion is probably too much for anyone to pay for that. But if RIM keeps stumbling and the market reacts it could become a worthwhile target for acquisition and I think Apple would be best positioned to take advantage.
The thing is though, if RIM collapses, where are the enterprise customers going to go? The only company that has a drop in product to replace that stuff is Apple.
Apple can do absolutely nothing here, and spend no money at all, and they will still end up with probably 60% or more of RIM's business if RIM goes under.
The thing is though, if RIM collapses, where are the enterprise customers going to go? The only company that has a drop in product to replace that stuff is Apple.
Apple can do absolutely nothing here, and spend no money at all, and they will still end up with probably 60% or more of RIM's business if RIM goes under.
Except why would RIM go under? RIM is more profitable than Nokia in the handset market, they're nowhere near going under and they can survive handily on just their enterprise customers. If Moto can survive and S-E can survive then RIM can certainly survive.
As I said before, I think RIM is gonna do just fine because of enterprise users. Sure iPhone now offers the same or even better features, but BB is still a status symbol for a business professional. Therefore, they can stop innovating and there would still be millions of sales in the medium term. ....
No.
The stock is failing badly and the companies financials have been bad for the whole last year. What usually happens in situations like that is the pressure from the shareholders and the BoD forces the company to re-align itself along more profitable lines in areas that are likely to experience actual growth. Once a company stops growing, the investors generally leave the next day (at least those that don't want to lose their money).
BBM is the only unique property they have that's likely to grow. What's likely to happen (assuming no one buys them out), is they fire the CEOs and re-align their strategy behind BBM by releasing the product for other mobile platforms. That way they can still keep selling their services to the enterprise but not necessarily on their own hardware.
It's just a long slow slide into obscurity at this point. The only thing that will stop it is if someone buys them outright and just kills them.
...BB is still a status symbol for a business professional.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chabig
I disagree. That used to be true, though I think the status of a BB faded long ago.
I have trouble imagining anyone who keeps up with business technology thinking BB is a status symbol. A workman like piece of equipment yes, but status symbol? Not any longer.
The stock is failing badly and the companies financials have been bad for the whole last year.
Bad for the last year but still better than Moto, S-E, Nokia and LG.
Quote:
Once a company stops growing, the investors generally leave the next day (at least those that don't want to lose their money).
Nope, all that happens is the price drops until the P/E ratio drops to reflect the lower growth opportunities. A P/E ratio of say 10 would be reasonable for a firm with stagnant growth - RIM is at 6 - implying that investors are already pricing in considerable loss of future profits.
Quote:
BBM is the only unique property they have that's likely to grow.
Absolutely wrong - their USP is their enterprise mail solution, which keeps the mail stored within the enterprise and integrates tightly with Exchange, Lotus Notes etc - to provide a secure corporpate email system that has a mobile reach.
As I said before, I think RIM is gonna do just fine because of enterprise users. Sure iPhone now offers the same or even better features, but BB is still a status symbol for a business professional. Therefore, they can stop innovating and there would still be millions of sales in the medium term. I think just like MS RIM can have products be very late to market, and people would still buy them out of habit and because they are "good for business customers".
Sure the stock might take a plunge, but the company won't shut down and will just operate with a lower market cap.
I don't think that's true anymore. So many people in business are abandoning the BB, mostly in favor of iPhones, and to a lessor extent, Android phones. Even business people are consumers. And with more companies allowing people to bring their own phones in, and their willingness to integrate them into their company network, the BB is being pushed out. And, in addition, when it's the "C" level executives that are doing the bringing and pushing, the CIO has no ability to deny them.
We're seeing the same thing happening to tablets. Most CIOs' have stated in a survey late last year, that they would be getting iPads, or have already done so. Only 9% said they were interested in the Playbook.
While it's sad, it really does look as though RIMs' time has passed. By the time QNX is on their phones, their sales and marketshare will have plummeted further. And then there's the problem of convincing developers to write for the platform.
Because its a BlackBerry. They have a strong brand in the business world. Many of my classmates in business school bought blackberries over iPhones and Androids just because they were blackberries and business people use blackberries.
But that's a dying market for them. Their sales increases are being made in third world countries where phones aren't subsidized, and cheaper BBs' have been popular. But that leads to lower dollar numbers, both in sales and profits. In the US and Europe, their marketshare has plummeted, and their sales are slowly drying urge BB brand is beginning tom mean, not prestige, but obsolescence and backwardness.
Even their vaunted security is becoming doubtful, with what has happened in various dictatorships around the world.
I've not seen any evidence it's dying, it's just not growing all that fast.
Quote:
Even their vaunted security is becoming doubtful, with what has happened in various dictatorships around the world.
From back in Jan
RIM also said that corporate email services remained unavailable to authorities, due to the fact the service incorporates a strict encryption algorithm that the company is not able to access, let alone provide access to a third-party.
RIM is still the gold standard for secure corporate email to the handset.
It's not a status symbol, but it is a security symbol - like a comfort blanket. An enterprise that uses BB keeps control over its own email, and this is a huge deal. A friend of mine is a banker at a top investment bank, he owns a US iPhone, a UK iPhone and has a corporate blackberry for email. I'm sure he'd love to be able to get rid of the BB, but until Apple can match RIM's email offering he won't be able to.
Then it's interesting that banks were some of the first businesses to move to the iPhone, and now, the iPad, and in large numbers.
I question RIMs' security. In theory, it's tops. But in actual practice, as long as RIM can get into the security themselves, as they can, it's not really any more secure that the iPhone is. As I mentioned last post, several third world nations have demanded that security key. While we don't know what actually happened, at least one of those countries stopped BB sales and turned off their network in the country for a while. Interestingly enough, the countries that were demanding the keys with the threats of killing BB sales there, and that included India, a big market for their cheaper models, suddenly stopped. The question was whether they got what they wanted. The other question is how many other governments have that key, including the USA and Canada.
The thing is though, if RIM collapses, where are the enterprise customers going to go? The only company that has a drop in product to replace that stuff is Apple.
Apple can do absolutely nothing here, and spend no money at all, and they will still end up with probably 60% or more of RIM's business if RIM goes under.
Yeah, it all depends on how low RIM's valuation goes. I don't think anyone would pick them up now at $14 billion. What do they have that's worth $14 billion? Their hardware and OS is last generation. Their talent has proved incapable of creating a smart phone able to compete with iPhone and Android. It's all about what a company would pay to secure their customers. But if the stock collapses, it might be worth picking up, just to secure that user base.
Then it's interesting that banks were some of the first businesses to move to the iPhone, and now, the iPad, and in large numbers.
Who? I've not worked for any investment banks that use iPhones. iPads are being used but not for email, they're being used as sales devices to show presentations - at least from what I've seen so far.
Quote:
I question RIMs' security. In theory, it's tops. But in actual practice, as long as RIM can get into the security themselves, as they can, it's not really any more secure that the iPhone is.
They don't have the email keys, the keys never leave the enterprise - that's the entire point and that's why they told the Indians that they simply weren't able to provide access.
I dont think that RIM are dying, either. And some people will always want a keyboard phone.
In the UK their market share doubled recently. I think it is higher than iOS. If iOS every drops market share while gaining unit share - the arguments on here would be so much different.
The real issue for them is declining margins, or is it? I think Apple is going to see declining margins from now on, too, if it wants to compete as a platform.
Comments
Actually there's no conclusive proof that Android is taking sales from RIM, it may very well be Apple who is. What we do know is that Android is rapidly taking sales from dumb-phones and old legacy smartphone systems like Bada, Symbian etc.
Short of a detailed retail survey that asks customers what they're switching from, to and why all we know are snapshots of the market.
Again I'm gonna link the US comscore results. Notice that Jan->Apr RIM lost handset share in the US but only as much as Samsung lost too. Motorola lost more. So the 'Android is killing RIM story' is plausibly false in the US at least.
People need to stop obsessing about smartphone market share and go back to looking at handset market share.
Top Smartphone Platforms
3 Month Avg. Ending Apr. 2011 vs. 3 Month Avg. Ending Jan. 2011
Total U.S. Smartphone Subscribers Ages 13+
Source: comScore MobiLens
\tShare (%) of Smartphone Subscribers
Jan-11\tApr-11\tPoint Change
Total Smartphone Subscribers\t100.0%\t100.0%\tN/A
Google\t 31.2%\t 36.4%\t 5.2
Apple\t 24.7%\t 26.0%\t 1.3
RIM\t 30.4%\t 25.7%\t -4.7
Microsoft\t 8.0%\t 6.7%\t -1.3
Palm\t 3.2%\t 2.6%\t -0.6
I think the results are pretty clear. RIM, M$ and Palm all down. Most of their customers are sucked up by Google, who grew 5.2.
Apple grew only 1.3, and they had a much smaller share to begin with. Don't get me wrong - Apple is clearly winning because they have better hardware and the OS is not fragmented and they have billions of apps.
But Google seems to be sucking up lots of (temporary) customers. And RIM is losing customers. Apple is holding steady with its installed base - they are actually growing a little bit, the only one besides Google.
Microsoft might as well just give up, and HP is crazy if they think that Palm is anything special. Sure - the vast majority of people are now choosing craptastic Android because they are so cheap. And they like to steal software or they are geeks. Or they just plain hate Apple.
But most people love Apple, and developers know that they can't ever make any money off of Android, so the new Android software is drying up, and Apple's growth is pretty much assured.
.All the Android phones are just plastic crap shoveled out in a desperate "me too" style and given away for cheap or free, just so the one trick pony can brag about how fast they grow.
But they aren't making any money. Android is just going to dry up and blow away when iOS 5 is released.
I think the results are pretty clear. RIM, M$ and Palm all down. Most of their customers are sucked up by Google, who grew 5.2.
Again I repeat - you are looking at the wrong numbers, you are looking at the smartphone share and you should be looking at the handset share. Android is rapidly winning out over dumb-phones and is driving huge numbers of consumers into the smartphone segment, but that's not the same thing as driving consumers off their old smartphones onto Android.
Suppose tomorrow everybody with a dumb-phone got handed a free android smartphone. That would give android a HUGE increase in their share, and RIM a commensurate decrease in the smartphone share but would it have any impact on RIM's business - no it wouldn't.
One last time in the hope that it gets through - stop looking at smartphone share, look at total handset share.
I found a transcript of their call. It's priceless:
"The BlackBerry was the number one smartphone in several countries in March and April including Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia..."
BlackBerry is big in those countries because of messaging, which is essentially free with the phone. Cheaper than texting.
Hmmm....Mac OS X, a stable desktop OS in use for the past 10 years, based on a rock solid BSD platform that has been refined for more than 30 years can learn from QNX, an embedded OS that has never seen a day in a desktop?
I thought you could buy QNX for Intel machines?
My late CEO father used to say, in business (and even more so in tech), if you're not growing, you're dying!
Wise words indeed for doing business, yet an argument pointing to the idea that our current economic system is flawed.
Unless only a handful surviving is deemed acceptable, of course.
As I said before, I think RIM is gonna do just fine because of enterprise users. Sure iPhone now offers the same or even better features, but BB is still a status symbol for a business professional. Therefore, they can stop innovating and there would still be millions of sales in the medium term. I think just like MS RIM can have products be very late to market, and people would still buy them out of habit and because they are "good for business customers".
Sure the stock might take a plunge, but the company won't shut down and will just operate with a lower market cap.
What you are talking about is a slow death.
[...] Waiting for the QNX operating system to make it to RIM's smartphone is "like waiting for Godot," Wolf said. [...]
It's almost like the Osborne Effect. Pre-announce a product far better than your current product, then watch your sales drop while customers wait for the new product to be released.
[...] As for the PlayBook and its 500,000 units shipped, RIM did not provide any details on the actual sell-through. [...]
Here we go again with the "shipped" vs. "sold" numbers. It's easy to ship 500k units "quite smoothly." There are lots of big warehouses out there in the supply chain. But selling to actual customers, who pay money for the products, is a different thing entirely.
[...] White believes that could be a concern for the company in its August quarter, and he does not see the PlayBook making a dent in Apple's iPad sales. [...]
It's been said before, but I'll say it again. There is no "media tablet" market. There is only the iPad market.
I think RIM could actually be an acquisition target for Apple. ... The real question is whether it'd be worth the cost. RIM has a market cap of $14 billion. Is their customer base worth $14 billion? At this point, in terms of acquisition, I think RIM's OS, hardware and most of its talent is essentially worthless. So any company would only be paying for their enterprise customers and solutions. $14 billion is probably too much for anyone to pay for that. But if RIM keeps stumbling and the market reacts it could become a worthwhile target for acquisition and I think Apple would be best positioned to take advantage.
The thing is though, if RIM collapses, where are the enterprise customers going to go? The only company that has a drop in product to replace that stuff is Apple.
Apple can do absolutely nothing here, and spend no money at all, and they will still end up with probably 60% or more of RIM's business if RIM goes under.
The thing is though, if RIM collapses, where are the enterprise customers going to go? The only company that has a drop in product to replace that stuff is Apple.
Apple can do absolutely nothing here, and spend no money at all, and they will still end up with probably 60% or more of RIM's business if RIM goes under.
Except why would RIM go under? RIM is more profitable than Nokia in the handset market, they're nowhere near going under and they can survive handily on just their enterprise customers. If Moto can survive and S-E can survive then RIM can certainly survive.
As I said before, I think RIM is gonna do just fine because of enterprise users. Sure iPhone now offers the same or even better features, but BB is still a status symbol for a business professional. Therefore, they can stop innovating and there would still be millions of sales in the medium term. ....
No.
The stock is failing badly and the companies financials have been bad for the whole last year. What usually happens in situations like that is the pressure from the shareholders and the BoD forces the company to re-align itself along more profitable lines in areas that are likely to experience actual growth. Once a company stops growing, the investors generally leave the next day (at least those that don't want to lose their money).
BBM is the only unique property they have that's likely to grow. What's likely to happen (assuming no one buys them out), is they fire the CEOs and re-align their strategy behind BBM by releasing the product for other mobile platforms. That way they can still keep selling their services to the enterprise but not necessarily on their own hardware.
It's just a long slow slide into obscurity at this point. The only thing that will stop it is if someone buys them outright and just kills them.
...BB is still a status symbol for a business professional.
I disagree. That used to be true, though I think the status of a BB faded long ago.
I have trouble imagining anyone who keeps up with business technology thinking BB is a status symbol. A workman like piece of equipment yes, but status symbol? Not any longer.
The stock is failing badly and the companies financials have been bad for the whole last year.
Bad for the last year but still better than Moto, S-E, Nokia and LG.
Once a company stops growing, the investors generally leave the next day (at least those that don't want to lose their money).
Nope, all that happens is the price drops until the P/E ratio drops to reflect the lower growth opportunities. A P/E ratio of say 10 would be reasonable for a firm with stagnant growth - RIM is at 6 - implying that investors are already pricing in considerable loss of future profits.
BBM is the only unique property they have that's likely to grow.
Absolutely wrong - their USP is their enterprise mail solution, which keeps the mail stored within the enterprise and integrates tightly with Exchange, Lotus Notes etc - to provide a secure corporpate email system that has a mobile reach.
Mmm... toast and BlackBerry jam...
Mmmm! I make the best blackberry jam.
As I said before, I think RIM is gonna do just fine because of enterprise users. Sure iPhone now offers the same or even better features, but BB is still a status symbol for a business professional. Therefore, they can stop innovating and there would still be millions of sales in the medium term. I think just like MS RIM can have products be very late to market, and people would still buy them out of habit and because they are "good for business customers".
Sure the stock might take a plunge, but the company won't shut down and will just operate with a lower market cap.
I don't think that's true anymore. So many people in business are abandoning the BB, mostly in favor of iPhones, and to a lessor extent, Android phones. Even business people are consumers. And with more companies allowing people to bring their own phones in, and their willingness to integrate them into their company network, the BB is being pushed out. And, in addition, when it's the "C" level executives that are doing the bringing and pushing, the CIO has no ability to deny them.
We're seeing the same thing happening to tablets. Most CIOs' have stated in a survey late last year, that they would be getting iPads, or have already done so. Only 9% said they were interested in the Playbook.
While it's sad, it really does look as though RIMs' time has passed. By the time QNX is on their phones, their sales and marketshare will have plummeted further. And then there's the problem of convincing developers to write for the platform.
Because its a BlackBerry. They have a strong brand in the business world. Many of my classmates in business school bought blackberries over iPhones and Androids just because they were blackberries and business people use blackberries.
But that's a dying market for them. Their sales increases are being made in third world countries where phones aren't subsidized, and cheaper BBs' have been popular. But that leads to lower dollar numbers, both in sales and profits. In the US and Europe, their marketshare has plummeted, and their sales are slowly drying urge BB brand is beginning tom mean, not prestige, but obsolescence and backwardness.
Even their vaunted security is becoming doubtful, with what has happened in various dictatorships around the world.
But that's a dying market for them.
I've not seen any evidence it's dying, it's just not growing all that fast.
Even their vaunted security is becoming doubtful, with what has happened in various dictatorships around the world.
From back in Jan
RIM also said that corporate email services remained unavailable to authorities, due to the fact the service incorporates a strict encryption algorithm that the company is not able to access, let alone provide access to a third-party.
RIM is still the gold standard for secure corporate email to the handset.
Mmmm! I make the best blackberry jam.
Apple+Blackberry ftw - at least for jam.
It's not a status symbol, but it is a security symbol - like a comfort blanket. An enterprise that uses BB keeps control over its own email, and this is a huge deal. A friend of mine is a banker at a top investment bank, he owns a US iPhone, a UK iPhone and has a corporate blackberry for email. I'm sure he'd love to be able to get rid of the BB, but until Apple can match RIM's email offering he won't be able to.
Then it's interesting that banks were some of the first businesses to move to the iPhone, and now, the iPad, and in large numbers.
I question RIMs' security. In theory, it's tops. But in actual practice, as long as RIM can get into the security themselves, as they can, it's not really any more secure that the iPhone is. As I mentioned last post, several third world nations have demanded that security key. While we don't know what actually happened, at least one of those countries stopped BB sales and turned off their network in the country for a while. Interestingly enough, the countries that were demanding the keys with the threats of killing BB sales there, and that included India, a big market for their cheaper models, suddenly stopped. The question was whether they got what they wanted. The other question is how many other governments have that key, including the USA and Canada.
The thing is though, if RIM collapses, where are the enterprise customers going to go? The only company that has a drop in product to replace that stuff is Apple.
Apple can do absolutely nothing here, and spend no money at all, and they will still end up with probably 60% or more of RIM's business if RIM goes under.
Yeah, it all depends on how low RIM's valuation goes. I don't think anyone would pick them up now at $14 billion. What do they have that's worth $14 billion? Their hardware and OS is last generation. Their talent has proved incapable of creating a smart phone able to compete with iPhone and Android. It's all about what a company would pay to secure their customers. But if the stock collapses, it might be worth picking up, just to secure that user base.
Then it's interesting that banks were some of the first businesses to move to the iPhone, and now, the iPad, and in large numbers.
Who? I've not worked for any investment banks that use iPhones. iPads are being used but not for email, they're being used as sales devices to show presentations - at least from what I've seen so far.
I question RIMs' security. In theory, it's tops. But in actual practice, as long as RIM can get into the security themselves, as they can, it's not really any more secure that the iPhone is.
They don't have the email keys, the keys never leave the enterprise - that's the entire point and that's why they told the Indians that they simply weren't able to provide access.
In the UK their market share doubled recently. I think it is higher than iOS. If iOS every drops market share while gaining unit share - the arguments on here would be so much different.
The real issue for them is declining margins, or is it? I think Apple is going to see declining margins from now on, too, if it wants to compete as a platform.