Ever since Research in Motion (RIM) pushed aside its two co-CEOs in favour of Thorsten Heins earlier this year, many analysts have been pondering how the maker of the once-popular BlackBerry smartphone family might bring itself back from the brink of extinction.
Certainly, the traction gained in the smartphone market by Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, and even Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 (WP7), has had a crushing effect on the position of RIM in that market.
The steady, yet rapid fall of mobile phone operating systems such as the BlackBerry OS, Palm/WebOS, and even to a lesser extent Nokia’s ageing Symbian offering, has shown that the current market simply isn’t prepared to support a fourth major mobile operating system.
So what exactly can Thorsten Heins do to bring RIM back from the edge of the abyss, if the market doesn’t care for another mobile OS?
In a nutshell, if you can’t beat them – (and RIM won’t) – join them!
What RIM should really be doing is developing applications to run on iOS, Android, and WP7 to deliver the popular Blackberry functionality on those platforms.
People use iOS, Android and WP7 because they like them, and really want to use them, so new handsets from RIM aren’t likely to be the answer.
The answer is to bring the unique features of the BlackBerry – the features that made them popular – to the popular handsets.
Find just the right price point for those applications, and a new chapter for RIM might be just around the corner.
But they don’t have long – or people will forget about them completely.