The recent euphoria over Verizon finally prying the iPhone from AT&T's exclusive grasp, along with the almost weekly announcement of new Android products, has probably left smartphone pioneer RIM feeling awfully neglected. While the BlackBerry is merely the latest in a long line of technology products that can lay claim to the honorary Mark Twain "Reports of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated" award, if not outright dying, the BlackBerry may be slowly creeping to irrelevance.
The debate rages over the meaning of these market shifts to corporate IT buyers. In the short term, probably nothing. BlackBerry, with it's noteworthy email security, excellent central management system and worldwide, nonexclusive availability will remain a hit with inherently conservative enterprise and government users. Longer term, as the era of corporate liable phones goes the way of secretarial pools and smartphones become more personal fashion accessory than office product, RIM's status looks iffy. Employees wanting, nay demanding, to use their personal phones to access corporate email is a well established trend, and in the future, two-thirds of these will be Apple or Google devices.
As corporations displace laptops with tablets and smartphones, a phenomenon recently highlighted by Deloitte, and enterprises start porting custom applications to these devices, it seems likely the BlackBerry OS could be the odd man out. Android and iOS have already established application development and distribution ecosystems of such size and mindshare that even Microsoft can't penetrate the mobile app market. It's hard to see how RIM will fare any better. If this duopoly translates their consumer dominance to the corporate app world, RIM could see the accelerated withering of their core franchise.
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1 comments:
awesome....nice article ,thx
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