By now you’ve unquestionably read or not less than heard in regards to the Big apple Times interview where RIM’s co-CEOs wound up asking among the questions and challenged conventional wisdom in regards to the company, or seen the BBC interview that Mike Lazaridis put an abrupt end to (see below, for those who haven’t). Those both offer a number of juicy morsels for folk like us to chew on, but they’re also indicative of a broader sense of frustration from the corporate that’s getting difficult to disregard. One which is strikingly reminiscent of what we’ve recently seen from another company that grew to dominate at the world stage, became a figure of national pride in its home country, and is now struggling to reinvent itself within the face of stiff competition: Nokia.
To get an concept of the way similar the 2 situations are, we only ought to look back to 2009 — admittedly an eternity inside the smartphone business, but not likely that way back. While Nokia still dominated the global smartphone market with Symbian by year’s end, there have been clear signs that was about to vary, with Nokia’s share slipping an entire ten percent within the fourth quarter of 2009 alone — largely on the expense of Apple and, yes, RIM. After that, it wasn’t long before the corporate’s CEO found himself inside the hot seat , while Gartner and countless others began tossing around phrases like “re-arranging the deck chairs.” We know what happened next.
Now the numbers are painting a similarly difficult position for RIM. In accordance with a recent Gartner report , RIM’s market share is anticipated to continue a slow decline to only eleven percent by 2015 (long after its switch to QNX), while Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 7 (boosted partly by Nokia’s acceptance) are all projected to keep growing or hold their very own, and leave RIM in a comparatively distant fourth place by 2015.
After all, those projections are only that… projections, and RIM could well still swing things in its favor if it makes the correct moves — whether or not the PlayBook isn’t quite the magic bullet it hoped for. It won’t, however, if it continues with a headstrong approach and ignores any criticism — or worse, continues to vent its frustrations in public. I’m not pretending to grasp what all those right moves shall be, but RIM could learn a couple of things from the hard questions Nokia posed to itself when it finally came to the conclusion that it was a fading giant.
In his now famous ” burning platform ” memo, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said the corporate needed to choose whether to “build, catalyze or join an ecosystem.” With its slow shift to 0 QNX 0 as its primary operating system, 1 continued promises 1 in regards to the current BlackBerry OS, and 2 half-hearted embrace 2 of Android apps, it’s increasingly beginning to appear as if RIM is making an attempt to do all three, but only succeeding in tying itself to a sinking ship.
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