Research in Motion shares sink 21%

Source: CNN

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- BlackBerry maker Research In Motion believes its white knight is coming. But while it waits, the company is drastically lowering its financial outlook and handing out pink slips.

Very disappointing sales of BlackBerry smartphones and tablets during the last quarter led RIM to cut its full-year profit expectations by 30% Thursday. The Waterloo, Ontario-based company also announced that it will begin a program to "streamline operations," which will include layoffs.

RIM said its forthcoming operating system, BlackBerry OS 7, will enable a slew of sexy, high-end product launches across the globe that will get the company out of its current funk. But the release of BB7 has been delayed until late August at the earliest. That means the majority of the company's sales in the meantime have been -- and will be for the near term -- made up of cheaper, lower-end devices.

snip...

The latest, greatest BlackBerry smartphone, the Torch, is nearly a year old -- an eon in the fast-paced mobile device market. Meanwhile, Apple and Google have passed by the former market leader. Analysts and the media have begun to speculate that RIM is in need of a management overhaul.

Read more: http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/16/technology/rim_earnings_q1/index.htm?section=money_latest

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RIM is history. When Apple revealed its coming 'iMessage,' analysts instantly said, 'the last unique feature of BlackBerry has been overshadowed.'

Like Palm before it, an HP will buy it out, scavenge the patents, and tear it down.

Apple, Google and now Microsoft, will erase RIM from memory.

Apple's iOS and Google's Android have completely
obsoleted the old-line mobile phone companies.

Tesha

...except Samsung, but they're getting there.

Wouldn't that be funny?



'When all is said and done, Apple has enough cash and liquid assets to buy every phone manufacturer except for Samsung. As companies like Nokia and RIM continue to decline, Apple's cash could increase to the point where it can gobble up Samsung, too. Obviously, regulators would not let this happen, but it's still fun to think about.'

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/06/17/apple-has-more-cash-than-most-mobile-phone-manufacturers-combine

Now that they own Palm, they are hoping to leverage WebOS into a tablet environment.

Unfortunately, they are targeting the Enterprise customers and pissing off the hobbyist base that kept that OS viable.

$202.08B

IBM $199.17B

is nothing to sneeze at. Plus they have far different requirements than hobbyists and consumer uses.

while the iPad was one of the 1st to market it does not include a lot of features that enterprise IT require.

The only feature that the iPad/iPhone seem to lack that
corporate IT requires is that they require constant
support from a large staff of corporate IT employees.

Seriously, what's missing?

It has on-device security, remote wiping, good E-mail,
a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program,
the ability to emit video in a wide variety of formats,
etc. They are reliable and reasonably sturdy, easy to
backup and easy to clone if a replacement is needed.

They are becoming very popular in corporate culture.

Tesha

and now it is Apple's turn. Someday they will be displace, but knowing Apple, they will be off disrupting another market sector.

They're the world's largest manufacturer of cell phones. They might not have a dog in the smartphone fight, but they're doing okay.

Since about last year, Nokia has fired:

o Its CEO (Olli-Peka Kallasvuo)

o Its CFO (Rick Simonson)

o Its Senior VP of Engineering (Peter Roepke)

o Its President of Nokia North America (Mark Louison)


Meanwhile:

o Its Executive VP in charge of markets (Anssi Vanjoki)
quit when he didn't get the CEO job.

o Its CTO (Rich Green) is on "indefinite leave of absence"


There have been countless other re-shuffles of senior staff.

Its smartphone share absolutely evaporated (from more than 60%
to about 28% at last tally, overtaken by both Apple and Samsung).
They are abandoning their famous "Symbian" ("S60") smartphone
platform in favor of Microsoft's WinPhone 7; the orphaning of
Symbian has contributed to some of the share slide but so
has the fact that lately, as it has tried to adapt to touchscreen
phones, Symbian has really sucked.

Their share of "featurephones" is dropping like a rock as well
as "Shanzai" phones (locally-produced phones) grab huge swaths
of their business. They were very late to the "dual SIM card"
market and that has cost them share as well.

Their share price has dropped by 50% over the last year with
most of the tumble occurring since February when their new
CEO (Stephen Elop, ex of Microsoft) wrote his famous "Burning
Platform" memo and announced that Nokia would shift entirely
to using (surprise!) Microsoft's phone software. Now, Elop says
he can't forecast what Nokia's numbers will be for the next few
quarters: that's right, no guidance to the market at all for
either gross revenues or profits/losses.

As a result, Nokia's credit rating has been cut by many
different rating agencies around the world; their bond
rating is now a very few steps above "junk".

They are in the midst of laying-off 7,000 workers worldwide
after having done other, more-focused lay-offs over the last
few years. Entire divisions are being axed.

Nokia has closed its retail operations in North America, the
UK, and elsewhere. It has closed its web sales operations
in the UK.

And right now, Apple is worth about 13 Nokias, up from about
3 Nokias about two years ago.

Nokia is rapidly exiting the mobile phone marketplace and
they've bet the entire company on their gamble to switch to
WinPhone 7; personally, I wouldn't take that gamble.

Tesha

to iPhones or Androids if their companies allowed it.

Now with applications/services like GOOD, they are switching.

Blackberry's are secure email machines, that's about it.

The iPhone is not a business tool. Blackberry is still the business device of choice with the ability to manage it centrally and lock it down. iPhone can't do that. So I suspect Blackberry has some life left in the business world. Certainly not in the typical consumer world though.

Many markets now have dedicated "vertical" applications
for either the iPhone, iPad, or both. For example, there
are medical apps that let the iDevices access medical
databases for records access, note taking, X-Ray viewing,
drug interaction screens, and the like. Other markets are
developing other similar tools.

And quite a few big companies have developed their own
dedicated applications, often for their road warriors
or field agents.

This is the first time that a mobile platform has
been rich enough in features, easy enough to program,
ubiquitous enough in the market, and sufficiently broadly
accepted by its users to allow this sort of a transition.

It's quite a bit like Alan Kay's "Dynabook" vision years
ago, but better because it connects to the cloud.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook

Tesha

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