Wall Street Agrees: Apple’s iMessage Will Kill Blackberry
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Shares of Research in Motion fell to a four-year low Tuesday as observers weighed-in on the impact of Apple’s iMessage, the just-announced iOS 5 instant-messaging app that could steal (yet again) RIM’s thunder.
Yesterday, shares of the Canadian-based handset maker fell 3 percent, dropping below $37 for the first time since 2007 on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Wall Street’s similar lack of confidence followed Apple’s Monday announcement of iMessage, a service included in the tech giant’s upcoming iOS update that does for iPhones, iPads and iPods what had been the sole preserve for BlackBerry Messenger.
One analyst Tuesday said iMessage is just the latest breach of RIM’s once-impenetrable armor. The new service “will become one more reason for users to defect from Blackberry in 2012,” Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair said.
BlackBerry Messaging is one of the key reasons you see high numbers of teens and college students using the smartphone, he noted. However, Apple has the numbers to reverse that trend.
What do you think? Does iMessage eliminate RIM’s one last advantage, or does Blackberry still have an ace up its sleeves? Let us know in the comments.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
