RIM CEO: We want to be the number three platform on the market

I'm not sure what that statement means. It is not winner takes all, with your logic there is only room for 1? Mobile is a growing market, if you think there is no room for competition your betting either Apple or Android will be the only platform.

Absolutely.

They should not be chasing the consumer, iOS-esque market. Some would say they've lost it, but I'd actually challenge that they never had it. Blackberry has always been an enterprise and small business solution. Historically, unless my numbers are way off, most consumers didn't own smartphones in the Blackberry Era. By and large, those who owned Blackberries were either using company-issued Blackberries, or had used company-issued Blackberries and purchased personal ones on the side. Kids and casual consumers had Motorola RAZRs and other non-smart phones.

The critical implication here is that the Blackberry did not open the floodgates of mass, consumer smartphone adoption. The iPhone did (and lately, the iPhone and Android have been).

In the years of Blackberry's dominance over the smartphone market, the smartphone market was comparatively small and concentrated. And, very important, it was use-case-specific (email). This was differentiated from the predominant mass-consumer use case (SMS). So there was a clear and safe divide between the two segments.

RIM was making a fortune in those days, but then it assumed that it needed to follow suit when the iPhone launched. And it's been all downhill from there.

Meanwhile, there are still a fair number of enterprise and small business owners and CTOs who prefer Blackberry to iOS/Android for business, and who buy Blackberry for their businesses. That number is dwindling rapidly, as you point out, the more Blackberries start to resemble half-hearted iPhones. But it's still a very lucrative niche that RIM can purpose-build for. I would bet, however, as you seem to, that RIM fails to capture it.

So what can RIM do to stay relevant in enterprise? For one thing, don't shy away from the keyboard. Embrace it. It's a point of clear differentiation, and though the cool kids will scoff at it, many business executives still prefer it for email. They might always prefer it. Second, develop more robust enterprise software. Blackberry should be able to handle spreadsheets, Powerpoint, word processing, data visualization(!!!), cross-device integration (printers, etc.), and other key enterprise solutions in a way that iPhone and Android don't.

This is not going to be easy. And it'll be especially difficult, in as much as many of the standard enterprise software solutions are offered by Microsoft, a competitor. Nobody's going to use a RIM-only spreadsheet program that doesn't integrate with Excel, for instance.

It is not a strategy. It is a futile attempt to make it sound like they have a strategy. In most businesses, there is a natural market for #2. Somebody, somewhere, wants to be different. Somebody, somewhere, is offended by #1's size. Somebody, somewhere, finds #1's product too bland and watered-down for the masses. There will always be a Pepsi for every Coke.

The trouble with trying to be #3 is that even in saying it, you're talking about going after #1's market. And you will lose to #1 and #2 so huge that you'll be bankrupt.

The right way to be #3 in smartphones is to be #1 in education, or #1 in the 10-12 adolescent market, or #1 in the handheld gaming market, or #1 in the dweebs-who-use-Linux-on-their-phones market, or what-have-you.

This was detailed decades ago in Reis & Trout's "Marketing Warfare" book. There are four strategies:

- Defence (#1 in the market)

- Offence (#2 in the market)

- Flanking (Disrupt the market through an indirect approach)

- Guerilla (Dominate a niche market)

Nowhere in this list do you find "Lose the major market to the Offence and Defensive players."