"We believe that BlackBerry cannot succeed if we try to be everybody's darling and all things to all people," RIM’s recently-installed chief executive, Thorsten Heins, said on a conference call to discuss the $125m loss it posted overnight.
“Therefore, we plan to build on our strengths to go after targeted consumer segments. We will seek strong partnerships to deliver those consumer features and content that are not central to the BlackBerry-valuable position; for example, media-consumption applications."
If RIM has been trying to be everybody’s darling until now, it hasn’t been working. Its shares are trading for less than $14, having peaked at more than 10 times that in 2008. The pioneer of the smartphone boom, Canada’s technology superstar finds itself on death watch.
On a recent trip to the United States, I met a technology journalist from a Canadian newspaper group who noted with gallows humour that he was glad to be away from the depressing RIM beat for a few days.
Mr Heins’ rescue plan, as far as observers can divine, is to give up on services such BBM Music, its iTunes rival, and attempt to rebuild the business by mostly targeting the corporate customers that powered its earlier success.
But while BlackBerry became a household name off the back of its former status as a corporate must-have, today technology is moving in the opposite direction. IT departments are adapting to a world in which workers increasingly expect to be able to use their own Android device or iPhone for work and expect to be able to access the data they need easily.
With that ongoing change, the traditional RIM corporate strengths of built-in security and remote manageability get weaker with each passing month. Its actual hardware and software meanwhile appears ever more antediluvian against the large touch screens and intuitive apps of BlackBerry’s rivals. While they add hundreds of thousands of new customers every day, RIM reported quarterly growth of only two million.
Faced with an unstoppable wave, retreat is an understandable instinct. RIM’s desire to compete with Apple and Google have led to disastrous initiatives such as the PlayBook, its tablet computer, which was introduced without an email application and has failed to make even a dent in the iPad’s dominance. Less than a year after its introduction, it languishes in the bargain bins of online stores.
The PlayBook fiasco was just one of a catalogue of failures that made 2011 an annus horribilis for RIM. As a result of the uniquely centralised way it offers BlackBerry users internet access (one of those “core strengths” Mr Heins wants to exploit), millions were cut off for several days across the whole of Europe, the Middle East and Africa by a catastrophic fault at a RIM site in Egham, Surrey.
It was a symptom of a deep malaise that has gripped the firm since the introduction of the iPhone.
Mobile industry observers have only one precedent with which to compare RIM’s predicament. In its turnaround bid, Nokia has taken the radical and controversial step of dumping its own software almost entirely, in favour of Microsoft’s, and its success is far from assured.
RIM’s problems are greater than Nokia’s and yet its plan to dump a few online services and “refocus” on corporate customers is much more conservative.
