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.
Comments
3 responses to “The BlackBerry PlayBook Might Fail, But Don’t Count Out RIM Yet”
I couldn’t disagree more. I can take your entire article and replace a few key words : RIM = Nokia, Enterprise Market = Low end consumer market and voilà : Nothing to see here folks, move along. Unfortunately there is plenty to see here. Whether we like it or not, RIM had the chance of a lifetime with the little candybar known as the BB Pearl and they milked it for 3 years juicing up consumer demand and actually adding some coolness factor to the brand and then they threw it all away. It’s easy to say they’ll always be a niche market in their little enterprise corner. Hell, Apple will always be niche market in the high end PC space, yet, we don’t see them sitting on their laurels for three years with the same model. The problem with RIM is that they stopped innovating. Something changed in their internal culture and they just stopped innovating. RIM is in trouble. That little niche enterprise market that they have is up for grabs and someone will take it sooner rather then later. My bet is on M$ as hard as that seems today.
Adi
I must admit that I agree 100% with everything, but I still think you shouldn’t count RIM from the race yet.
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