As many know by now, the mighty duo of
CEO’s at RIM, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis have stepped down only
to promote one from within. Taking over as single and only CEO of
Research in Motion is Thorsten Heins, a four year COO who worked
closely under Jim and Mike. In recent news, he’s been given the cold
stare thanks to making such statements as “I don’t think there is some drastic change needed,” and “We are evolving. We’re evolving our strategy, we’re evolving our tactics, our processes.” As
one standing from the outside looking in, I’d argue in favor of a
drastic change, personally. But hey, RIM’s the competition so I’m not
pressing the issue. However, the question does arise, should Google’s
Android be afraid? As much as I would love to shout from the roof top “hell no!“, I”ll try to keep it professional here.
With RIM falling drastically behind every quarter, Android, iOS and Windows Phone
pretty much occupy the top three OS’s of choice when thinking of
purchasing a smartphone in the US, it’s very likely there’s no room for
a fourth. RIM would have to seriously step up its game if they want to
penetrate the top three and make a serious come back in the market.
And the only way they are seriously going to do that is with a major
wow factor. And by “wow factor” I mean both in the software and the
hardware department There’s simply too much talk going on and as much
as Blackberry
fan-boys want to defend the new CEO, it doesn’t look like he’s on-board
with any kind of “change”. So, should Android be worried? While BB10
or BBX (QNX) does look promising as well as some of the hardware
floating around like the Blackberry London, it’s hard to say. However,
the newly anointed CEO states that he wants to focus more on current
Blackberry owners and how to get them upgraded in a timely manner
rather than focusing on a new innovative product. On the one hand you
want to think that the combo of hardware and software appears to be
promising but on the other, even if they were to release such a device
like this tomorrow, specs under the hood would be an entirely new post
altogether. RIM is notorious for releasing yesteryear’s specs and in
my opinion Android and iOS are in no immediate danger, not by a long
shot. The company has barely introduced 1GHz CPU’s while most new
Android devices will be launching quad-core processors. However,
everyone knows competition is good and more is usually always better.
So, on behalf of the Android community, I’d say to Thorsten and RIM,
get it together if you want to play with the big dogs. You’ll have to
do better than devices like the Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy Note and Droid Razr Maxx if
you want to stay relevant in the industry. And who knows, there’s
speculation that maybe Microsoft will buy them out, increasing their
market share instantly while simultaneously benefiting the Enterprise
industry. It’s either that or quietly die. Only time will tell if
Heins’ new road map for RIM will keep them in the game. We’ll see what
the company can produce at MWC. Stay tuned as we follow our
competition closely and feel free to leave your thoughts in the
comments below.
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