Nawien, MSFT..PDA COMS..Palm division....who will prevail in the crowded..access market
Of course. Plus handheld game consoles and cell phones all converging. It's waaay early in the game, the playing field is huge, and most of the bowling pin goals on the field are still obscure in the morning fog.
As for RIMM relative to Palm, Palm is selling to individual corporate gen-X'ers and assorted technophiles, while RIMM is selling into enterprise departments/divisions, much further up the evolutionary ladder, and a well defined bowling pin IMO. RIMM is much more focused than Palm (Palm has 3Com management<g>). RIMM's next bowling pin is ISP-based mobile consumer email, as currently advertised by RCN (where RCN provides the central email facility and RIMM server), and soon at say AOL and Mindspring (as mentioned by Merrill).
As for Microsoft, well, they've screwed it up so often, and so many people hate them, that I'll have to see both market share and profit margin before I'll believe them.
I only bring RIMM up in this group because they appear to have crossed the chasm into a firm niche or two, and I think their enterprise niche has them closer to this modest hypergrowth-potential market than any of the others. Whether the enterprise market will be gorilla or royalty, I guess it depends upon whether RIMM can establish it's server application as a standard. Could even turn out that RIMM's enterprise functionality all gets subsumed into future laptops, leaving RIMM to collect royalties.
For a mass consumer market, RIMM's mobile email is not enough IMO. It needs to add server-based features like ICQ-style voice chat, credit card via IR port, and thumbprint ID certification, plus gadget features like electronic office/house/car keys, TV remote, and GPS locator -- all in a mobile handheld. But this is at least a few years away, and I expect to see lots of big players between now and then.
- Dway |
