Responding to RIM’s layoff announcement yesterday, Wall Street said the BlackBerry maker had met its worst nightmare in Apple… a one-trick pony about to be dragged to the glue factory by iOS 5 and iMessage.
BlackBerry Messenger was RIM’s best selling point, even attracting teens to the device usually found in corporations rather than college campuses. Now iMessage is “effectively identical,” making lame the pony from Waterloo. Even worse, RIM limped into the smartphone market too late and too limited.
“Consumers now want phones that provide a broad selection of software and services,” Needham & Company analyst Charlie Wolf told investors Friday. “What do you do when your one trick no longer works?” he asks.
Not only is RIM slow and essentially useless, the BlackBerry maker is caught in a squeeze play between the iPhone and Android. Expect a copy of iMessage to appear on Android handsets “as quickly as it can,” Wolf says.
Thursday, RIM announced it will cut costs, fire employees and take other measures to restrain the red ink. Wall Street analysts were quick to pile on, issuing six stock downgrades this morning. “Control + Alt + Delete” one observer remarked, leaving little doubt about the dire straights RIM finds itself.
As for how well RIM’s PlayBook tablet is doing against the iPad, RIM announced it shipped 500,000 units during the second quarter. However, the company did not release sales figures, leaving some analyst unsure just how well the tablet is actually performing.
Among those scratching their heads is Ticonderoga Securities analyst Brian White. White summed-up the entire blood-letting as “a disaster [that] turns into a nightmare.”
The nightmare is Apple, as the iPhone and iPad maker scoops up even more market share while RIM and Nokia stumble and fall by the wayside.
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.
18 responses to “Wall Street: iMessage Turned RIM Into a Broken One-Trick Pony”
Goodbye RIM. I never cared to know you. :\
RIM is done, put a fork in it. As usual, the worker bees and shareholders are getting the shaft. Meanwhile, the co-ceo tards and the threesome-coo tards are handsomely rewarded for running the company into the ground.
Unless RIM can do an Apple and save themselves from the brink of extinction with a new (slash old, in Apple’s case) leader, I do believe this is the end for RIM. Goodbye, never really liked your products, the PlayBook failed and now I just feel sorry for the staff. ‘Ta.
When iPhone first came out I thought that RIM died on that day but they just don’t know it yet. I based that conclusion on the observation that RIM had zero experience and unproved expertise in competing in the take-no-prisoners consumer tech market and the best consumer tech company in the world just leveled its sights on RIM.
I have a flipped attitude for RIM. One, I don’t like their products and I am very happy Apple has been successful with iOS devices. I feel bad for RIM but that is just the way things go. After all this is the same thing Apple was dealing with not too long ago less we forget. Apple was struggling to keep afloat and everyone was buying the MS crap. Why I don’t feel bad for RIM? Like most of the device makers they all had time to give the customer what they wanted.
From the late 90’s into today we wanted something useful and we wanted something we knew would work. Not to mention compatible with our Mac’s Yet no one wanted or did half a decent job not even Palm with their lame Palm devices.
Now people are trying to put Apple in the same boat as Microsoft. The difference is Apple has done it RIGHT. They came back from the brink. Made devices everyone and their mother is buying that most people quickly forget they too once were about to disappear from the planet.
Say what you will about Apple’s dominance – I for one am glad I can connect my iPhone, and iPad to both my Mac and my Windows PC’s and guess what they WORK! I cannot wait to see what Apple does next with Lion on its way in July, I am excited for the Mac.
This just goes to show how precarious RIM’s business had become. Apple just has to announce a competing product to the Blackberry Message service and the bottom falls out of RIM’s business.
RIM can survive just like IBM has survived, by targeting government and corporate businesses. The BlackBerry is to the iPhone what the Mac is to Windows: more secure. 90% of the population does not need that level of security and control but the 10% that does will be willing to pay for it.
They do need to just move to a iPhone/Android hardware model though. Its simply what people want. Give them that with a slide out keyboard for those who want it and populate it with about 100 great apps (heck, pay Microsoft for their mobile mapping technology” and let 3rd party develop the rest and they could be around for a long time. Big Blue isn’t going leaving anytime soon so Big Black can do the same.
I love iMessage. The send button turns blue to let you know that it’s a free message to another iOS device. It stays green to let you know that the message will go out as an SMS to a non-iOS user. Because of this color change, my friends and I are already referring to iMessage as “Blue Button Messaging” or BBM for short… :) RIM oughta love that!
r.i.p. r.i.m.