Companies need to roll out devices to their entire sales and service teams, packing them with purpose-built business applications, not just generic email, browsers, and off-the-shelf productivity apps. With cellular connections, so salespeople are always connected, and the app also needs to works offline.
RIMM will cater to this business market. While Apple will have their devices cater to walled fluff content that consumers enjoy. RIMM will be about business - Apple walled fun.
Prem Watsa is going to have fun building RIMM devices that mean business.This all fits into the end to end global network of connecting things.
Seems to be the party line, RIMM builds for business and iPhone/Android is for 14yr old kids playing Angry Birds. I was at a company meeting last night, 100 employees, I saw 0 Blackberrys, everyone had an iPhone or Android with one Palm Pre (that person making fun of themself in a presentation). Three years ago 75% of this crowd had Blackberries, those same people all ditched them for the fun phones. I've asked a few of these people and everyone of them said ditching the Blackberry was worth it and they wished they did it earlier.
When you lose a customer like that it's hard to go back. I can't imagine any of these people jumping from the fun phone back to a Blackberry, the mindshare has been lost.
None of this stuff is fluff business either, people doing spreadsheets, one guy did a presentation off his iPhone.
One more anecdote, our company is moving into the mobile space in a large way due to customer demand. What do customers want? They only want iOS and Android applications, they've communicated clearly that Blackberry/Palm/Windows isn't worth the effort.
This is all anecdotal but from my vantage point it's significant. I don't hold any RIMM shares nor do I want to, I'm not sure how you regain all those lost customers. Will be fascinating to watch.
