The Smartphone Wars:  With Enemies Like These, Who Needs Friends?
<p>Android just got a boost it didn&#8217;t need.  RIM, already staggering after a 5% market-share drop over the last quarter and the Playbook debacle, has just&#8230;well, &#8220;shot itself through the foot&#8221; fails to convey quite the right sort of intensity. In fact it has executed a hitherto-unprecedented form of marketing suicide which can only be characterized as a &#8220;double-tap Osborne through the head&#8221;.</p>
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<p>Full story at <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/blackberry-os-7-how-to-osborne-your-smartphone-sales/17006?tag=content;search-results-rivers">BlackBerry OS 7: How to Osborne your smartphone sales</a> (hat tip to Ken Burnside for the link and the post title).  It&#8217;s well written, worth reading, and poignant for me because, yes, I myself once owned an Osborne 1.  In brief, RIM just murdered the sales prospects of all its existing hardware and software in favor of a new handset that won&#8217;t ship for a couple of months and a new OS version that will <em>not</em> be available as an over-the-air update to its existing customers.</p>
<p>A point I think the authors didn&#8217;t emphasize quite enough is how badly this move is going to cheese off RIM&#8217;s carrier partners.  RIM has just hammered not just its own revenue but the revenue the carriers were expecting from OS 6 handsets they had in inventory, which will now likely go unsold as customers realize they&#8217;ll never be upgradable.  RIM relies on its carrier partners not just as a sales conduit but for most of its marketing, as well.  How eager do you suppose the carriers are going to be to continue that, now?</p>
<p>It&#8217;s truly odd how something about the smartphone business seems to produce epic attacks of suicidal stupidity at formerly well-run companies, and the parallel with Nokia is becoming ever more compelling in this case. RIM&#8217;s initial strategic blunder &#8211; choosing to fight Android rather than co-opt it &#8211; has been followed by an escalating series of screwups in their execution, like the <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3117">bad joke that is the Playbook</a>.  </p>
<p>Following this one, my previous assessment that RIM might be able to fort up around its more inertia-ridden corporate customers for 5-9% of continuing market share is out the window.  They just threw that prospect away.  Now I think RIM&#8217;s got a year to live, tops, with their best case being a buyout by somebody with a use for their infrastructure.</p>
