RIM is a sinking ship

This shouldn’t surprise to anyone who has been following the mobile platform market closely. RIM has been out of the game for the past 3 years. And their management structure is a joke. Hardly anyone noticed because the smartphone market has been growing so incredibly fast and RIM was along for the ride. That ride is now over apparently because even in the smartphone market’s growth stage they still can’t make money. Their stock value has dropped over dropped 40% in the past three months.

Oh, and Apple announced the BBM killer, iMessage last week. RIM now has no competitive advantages over Apple’s devices. Except Flash™ and hardware keyboards. And I wouldn’t call either an advantage. Flash™ is a vulnerability and hardware keyboard causes platform fragmentation.

Update: This is my next has a nice wrap-up of yesterday’s call.

RIM Playbook at AllThingsD

Even with the CEO’s poor performance and lack of coherent understandable answers the PlayBook performance was really smooth. Of course, the demo was pretty lame as all we saw was a glorified task switcher and some document scrolling. The specs are great but the specs are always great for future products.

I was hoping to see some real functionality. It seemed like a big phone. Where is the use case for this over a smartphone? What can I do on this that I can’t on my phone? I’m amazed at how these companies create products without even really considering what they will be used for. The BlackBerry PlayBook lacks focus and usefulness.

Mike Lazaridis talks nonsense and shows RIM losing touch with the changing smartphone market.

This was a very poor performance by RIM’s Co-CEO. Most of the interview he responded incoherently to questions or was contradictory. RIM seems to be struggling with deciding on an actual platform for developers with the Torch running BB 6 and the unreleased PlayBook running QNX.

The other thing I thought was interesting was he seemed to assume that all the performance problems would be fixed once the hardware got better. He kept talking about multi-core being as being the only way to deliver good performance and experience for users. It just seems really naive for the CEO of RIM to assume hardware will solve software problems.

Apple & RIM Outsmart Everyone Else

Apple and RIM together only account for 3% of the cellphone market - yet make up 35% of the operating profits. Once again, another reason why profit NOT market-share matters.

Related: Nokia’s stock plunges on Apple’s and RIM’s success. It doesn’t matter if you have 98% market-share if you can’t stay in business. Nokia still has a chance to turn things around but they sure don’t have much momentum (at least here in the US). I predict Nokia will blow a lot of money trying to make high end handsets and fail - only to become the world leader in crappy candy bar phones…oh, wait…