- 20 Sep 13, 12:27#374111To continue the Blackberry discussion going on in another thread, RIM is a rags to riches to rags story in the making. I had the pleasure of visiting their Missisauga (SP?) manufacturing facility back in 2005, it was great to see them building their own devices in Canada, not outsourcing anything but component purchases. I wish Apple had the balls to do that.
They may not fully evaporate, but their heydays have been usurped by companies that you've heard of, like Apple and Google with their Android OS and the minions of hardware vendors. But what you may not know is that companies like Mobile Iron, Air Watch and Good. Have been just as if not more damaging.
RIM's big business was always their Blackberry Enterprise Server offering (BES). Wherein all secured communications from all BB devices would flow from their devices through a middle man datacenter and then to their destination. RIM offered at a time of wild wild west internet communications, a VERY secure way for big business to provide mobile email to their employees.
For that, they charged every carrier world wide that sold a BB device, ten dollar. That's ten dollars on top of it all, ten dollar pure profit coming in per device per year per carrier for every RIM device they sold. That was RIM's secret source of income that others simply couldn't match.
So, along comes Microsoft releasing a very crappy very insecure, very unreliable means of allowing your Windows Mobile device to sync up with your corporate email. And fast forward a bunch of years, Active Sync gets better, Companies like Mobile Iron and Air Watch figure out ways to create very robust very secure mobile device management platforms that allow users to securely connect their Android and iOS device to their corporate email, and allowed those corporations to distribute applications, and apply security policies and pretty much control an end user's handheld device as securely as if it was sitting in their internal corporate network.... and companies start to move away from the BES.
That's why RIM is in the position they're in. They didn't keep up with the exiting devices coming out from Apple and the Android herds. They wern't any good at playing games, there was hardly any apps you could install on their devices, and they failed to get Java developers to create content, (because they were all busy developing and selling apps for Apple and Android). Coupled with the enterprise secure email platform business.
RIP RIM.
Over the last couple of years, I know about four very high level folks at RIM that have jumped ship.
"I don't want to be part of a forum where everyone has differing opinions." Boom...