Special Report: A PlayBook for fighting Apple and Google
Tue Mar 15, 2011 11:50am EDT
BUSINESS ALTERNATIVES
Perhaps the biggest threat RIM faces is the impression its secure enterprise solution can be easily replicated or even dismissed as unnecessary, allowing employees to use their own device and handily saving corporations the cost of providing and managing a fleet of BlackBerrys.
Business software company SAP is certainly not waiting on RIM to move on its own mobile computing strategy. It has bought 3,500 iPads for internal use as it advises its more than 100,000 corporate customers that there is life beyond BlackBerry.
"There will be a need for one system that supports multiple devices," says the company's chief technology officer, Oliver Bussmann.
And SAP has one, called Afaria, which promises device-agnostic security and application management for Apple's iPhone and iPad and Android devices from Samsung. "Other device makers are catching up on encryption and how to share information without storing it on the device," he said.
RIM's Waterloo neighbor Open Text, a leading provider of software to manage enterprise content and workflows, recently bought a company that builds app platforms on any device.
NO VISIBILITY
There is perhaps no other technology company on the planet, no other established company in any sector for that matter, whose future prospects elicit such determined variance of opinion as Research In Motion.
Its fiscal 2011 results are due by the end of the month, with analysts expecting the company's earnings to have grown by 44 percent to $6.33 a share. Yet for the next twelve months, expectations range between $4 and $8 a share.
"The PlayBook is a great example of where we don't feel like there is any visibility whatsoever," said Tim Caulfield, head of equity research at Franklin Templeton's Bissett Investment Management. "It's extremely intriguing but it just leaves me with so many question marks."
Bissett exited its position in RIM by late in 2007 -- around the time RIM briefly became Canada's most valuable company -- after building it since early 2005.
They sold because the price "was discounting not only a bright future but an incredibly bright future in a scenario that would have required flawless execution and zero competition to come true," Caulfield said. RIM has had neither.
IT'S AN APP WORLD AFTER ALL
RIM is facing two distinct and powerful forces in its life-or-death battle for relevance as smartphones straddle corporate and consumer markets.
In one corner is Apple and the cult of Steve Jobs, a man who brought the computer company back from the brink by revolutionizing portable music, redefining what phones are for and reinvigorating a tablet market that lay dormant for years.
RIM, like much of the mobile phone industry, was blindsided by the popularity of Apple's first iPhone, which burst onto the scene in mid-2007 and was immediately set upon by a voracious developer community building small applications, now universally known as apps, to improve the experience.
The smartphone, once the domain of RIM and its addicted white-collar workers, had gone mainstream.
"RIM didn't expect iPhone to take off the way it did because it was so badly flawed from day one," the former RIM employee said. "They believed that users wanted great battery life, great security, great mail handling, minimal network use, and a great keyboard experience. They never expected users didn't care."
In the other corner stands Google, the darling of the first commercial wave of the Internet, a search engine machine that targeted mobile and within two years leapfrogged the U.S. smartphone market share of both Apple and RIM.
It gives its Android operating system away to all and sundry, its scale in turn refreshing the fortunes of the likes of Motorola and allowing once low-end manufacturers like HTC to play in the big-time.
Another giant of the pre-iPhone world, Nokia, has succumbed to the pressure, discarding its Symbian operating system to throw its lot in with Microsoft.
Both Apple and Android nurtured what are now thriving ecosystems around their products, populated by energetic third-party developers. RIM has many more coders writing for its BlackBerry platform but most work on proprietary programs that never see the light of the app store day.
"RIM dramatically misjudged ... they completely missed the rich user experience end of the market which is the driving force of smartphones today," said Chris Albinson, a Silicon Valley-based Canadian whose Panorama Capital has plowed half of a $240-million fund into companies working in mobile.
With the PlayBook, RIM has lowered the barriers to developer entry by offering many more coding tools, dropping (first temporarily, now permanently) the entrance fee it charged and the requirement of a notarized identity, and incorporating a unified system to deliver payments collected via advertising, credit card and carrier billing.
The development environment RIM has built for QNX is similar enough to Android that coders can easily rewrite their applications for the PlayBook.
Albinson, who says RIM should open its Messenger and enterprise servers to the world to avoid irrelevance, is doubtful it's enough. "Every single venture capitalist in Silicon Valley is telling their companies to focus on Apple and Android," he said.
While most developers will make the choice to engage or shun RIM based on a perceived return on investment, one outfit started by a University of Waterloo graduate had that choice imposed on it by legal writ.
Credit: Reuters (www.reuters.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment