The BlackBerry PlayBook Might Fail, But Don’t Count Out RIM Yet

The outlook continues to be pretty grim for RIM and the PlayBook specifically.

Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair believes that there is no “meaningful evidence” that RIM is poised to turn things around.

“Last quarter RIM talked about shipping 500,000 units but did not speak of sell-through for obvious reasons,” the analyst wrote in a note to investors on Wednesday. “Channel fill could turn up another decent shipment number this year in the 500,000 – 700,000 unit range but we believe sell-through has been weak enough that that number will trend down over the year and RIM will likely send the PlayBook into the same graveyard as the HP TouchPad.”

Despite a better adoption rate for the new BlackBerry OS 7  devices in the enterprise, analyst and tech pundits continue to place too much importance on RIM’s sales to consumers, even this has never been the BlackBerry core market. It almost akin to Microsoft being solely judged and valuated on the performance of the ZUNE players. What players you say? My point exactly.

Even though I don’t personally have faith in BlackBerry creating an iPhone or iPad  killer, it doesn’t mean that there is no place for them in the mobile market. There are still many many enterprise customers out there with existing BES infrastructures and it would be insane for them to throw out all of there security policy and let their employees run a muck on unsecured Android devices or personally acquired iPhones.

There is a place for everyone at the mobility market, there is no need to standardize on vanilla platforms like in the early days of  Windows desktop computing. Of course RIM’s stock price should be performing better, but comparing it to Apple’s run away stock price is insane. RIM is and always be a niche player, it just happens that it’s niche is in high end enterprise mobility, sadly the pundits, the analyst and even the BlackBerry marketing folk seem to forget the enterprise part far too often.

via BGR.com.