RIM rumored to lay off 2,000 more workers soon

This is precisely what makes BlackBerry and BES so appealing for enterprises. Also, I think e-mails are actually faster on BES than on BIS.

Little known fact: did you know that BES allows you to access your company's entire address book on your BlackBerry? When I was a co-op, it meant I could e-mail anyone in the company just by looking up their name. Sure, LDAP allows you the same capability, but on most platforms, that means you need to expose it publicly. You could secure by forcing use over a VPN, I suppose, but that's extra overhead as well, which is somewhat precious on a mobile device. It's less relevant nowadays, but it's a really cool feature that RIM has had for nearly a decade now that few consumers even know about.

I would argue that most BlackBerry users do not have they devices setup to take advantage of all of their capabilities. And to be honest, that is a huge failure of RIM's marketing and publicity teams.

On the extremely rare occasion I find myself waiting for an email, I take a deep breath and get back into the present moment.

I wouldn't bet on this forever. There are increasingly good tools to manage at least iOS devices in enterprise environments, and the platform security features of iOS are nearly as good as Blackberry. In the BYOD world (which is growing), you can deal with less management of devices (enforcing some minimum standards), then layering stuff like Good on top of them to secure business applications.

In the BYOD world, very few people will be bringing Blackberries to the party.

>It doesn't hold up. I suppose if you like a keyboard with a small screen it may be superior, but the 9900 runs a deprecated, dated OS with no app support.

I was referring to hardware build quality. Nowhere did I say that its software is comparable, and I actually made those points about legacy BBOS myself. Apologies if I didn't make that clear.

>Their problem is lack of vision. Regardless, they may or not have bad marketing, but every phone they released in the last 2-3 years has been subpar - no amount of marketing would have fixed that.

+1 on I said it was a two horse race. Apple is the biggest individual manufacturer and Android has a bigger market-share. At the same time, MS is trying to wedge themselves. Actually, MS is a good example of how incredibly tough it is to break into the market. Windows phones are actually pretty darn good devices, with good hardware and really nice software, backed by millions of marketing dollars, and they are still struggling. What does that say about Rim and BB10?

+1 on this, but does that mean that they shouldn't try? Should MS just stop trying?

> Samsung is making money. Amazon is making money. Using Android doesn't guarantee success but it would have given RIM a battle-tested modern OS to release their next generation of phones and tablets last year or two years ago. Don't get me wrong, I don't fault them for trying to build their own OS, because it wasn't clear 2 years ago that this was a bad decision, but with the benefit of hindsight QNX has been a total and utter disaster for the company. The one device it launched with has been a financial failure.

I'll answer your previous points here.

I think we're flipping back and forth between legacy BBOS and QNX. There's so many acronyms, it is difficult to keep it straight.

BBOS is for all intents and purposes, in maintenance mode (i.e. dead). QNX/BB10 is the new hotness. RIM has spent considerable effort to get their developer community moved over to the new platform, and it is working. At the same time, they're trying to bring back the developers they haemorrhaged, and bring in new ones. This seems to be working as well, but again, we'll see when the device launches what kind of apps we see. Apparently, App World is the fastest growing app store, with a ~264% jump in apps available. That's from RIM, so understand that it likely has some "spin" attached to it. :-P

Android does not fit the goals of RIM. QNX/BB10 does. RIM would rather focus on giving prosumers and enterprise users the tools they need to get things done (i.e. BlackBerry people do, another marketing angle from RIM). That means better battery life, easy and complete multitasking, with software that has an intuitive workflow so the user can accomplish what they need to, when they need to. RIM has significant engineering prowess and know-how that is miles ahead of what Apple or Google can achieve. To simply throw that away to latch onto Android? For what? Short-term profits? Samsung and Amazon make money, sure. Samsung makes it because they're selling handsets hand over fist with something like 40% of the Android market. Amazon makes practically nothing from devices and has resorted to making profits from its App Store. Amazon's model could be sustainable, but Samsung's likely isn't. Moreover, how much room is there for another Samsung in the Android space? None. None of the other manufacturers have a marketshare greater than 10%. You're talking about HTC, LG, and Motorola, all big name manufacturers, being squashed by Samsung.

I would argue that's a tougher way to compete, than to differentiate yourself with an entirely new OS.

My final point: startups fail all the time. You either recognize those failures and pivot, or you die. RIM is trying to pivot. Is it too late? Maybe. But let them try.