TOA: RIMM has certainly had a nice, sharp run up ..
Like Darth Vader said, 'Impressive!'. <g>
I still am wondering about the long term competitive threat to RIMM of smart phones.
In my view, RIMM's Blackberry product had near-perfect functionality and market timing - I expect their lead in that specific space to hold up for another year or two. I see Blackberry's market being people who find it helpful in their work, as opposed to say the teenage or home markets, and working people would accept carrying both cell phone and Blackberry better than the casual markets.
The whole form factor thing is yet to play out. Clearly a single cell phone + email/chat/pager + palm-thingie unit has big advantages, but I havn't heard of any single unit that does the job. One idea that sounded good on a TV show was a small personal wireless unit, say 3"x2"x1/2", that connects to the net, and connects via eg Bluetooth to personal phone mic/speaker, palm screen, laptop, softbook, music player, etc.
Long term, say 3 to 5 years out, I expect RIMM products to be overwhelmed by eg Sony or Nokia products, because RIMM can't erect sufficient barriers to entry into what will become a commodity hardware market (like PC's are now, where RIMM's best hope would be to become a Dell or Gateway).
Same argument applies to Palm, don't think they'll ever succeed long term as a hardware company. But, Palm has the Palm OS, and if that gets accepted as a de facto standard (over the shrieking and wailing of eg Symbian and Microsoft), then Palm has established a monopoly position and should give excellent returns for many years to come. No such opportunity that I see for RIMM.
- Dway |
