Nobody was caught quite as flatfooted by the iPhone as was Canadian tech darling Research in Motion, the company that brought us the Blackberry. Palm was on the ropes, and Windows Mobile has been a joke more or less since introduction — but RIM had a solid product and a committed user community that Apple has steadily eroded as they improved the iPhone platform.
The MobileOpportunity blog has a great rundown of this, complete with charts and graphs, that really is a fascinating read. One of the takeaways is that, for a firm like RIM, new subscriber growth is a major deal. You can sell all you want to the converted, but you don’t grow your market that way. You’ve got to sell to new users to do that. And RIM’s new subscriber growth is down.
As a follow-up bit of information, Gruber points out something interesting from RIM’s last earnings statement, which showed those distressing new-sub numbers:
RIM says it will no longer report subscriber growth in future quarters.
They’re in a bad spiral. I hope they can fix it, because Palm is dead and gone, and I think a happy, healthy handset ecosystem needs RIM.
Pretty fascinating article here, Farmer, and very true. About six months ago, my wife Sally had her Blackberry Curve (we both had them) stolen out of the office in our bookstore (it was later used to make numerous calls to Senegal, but that’s another story). She decided, due mostly to the influence of our Applehead neighbors, to try an iPhone, and she immediately fell in love with it. Sally is a technophobe, so I can generally tell when a technological product is good because she fails to complain about it. So I got my own iPhone about a month ago, and damn. Okay, so I’m not totally sold on the touch-screen keyboard, but it’s better than I feared; the sound quality is better; there’s an app for that (I have Plants Vs. Zombies as well as the complete works of Shakespeare; whiled away several hours last night reading Hamlet); it feels better in the hands; and the overall experience is just many times better than the businesslike but stuffy and irritating Crackberry. Where do platforms go when they die? They don’t go to heaven where the angels fly….(you’d better get that reference)