By BOB Goswami
December 17, 2011
PERSPECTIVE - Seems BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) has bad news in the U.S. market. If not, simply ask Joh Donahoe, Chief Executive of eBay, world's biggest online auction site.
A few months ago there were hundred engineers at eBay to develop new iterations of its shopping app for iPhone of Apple Inc. About another hundred are working in developing apps for Android mobile platform of Google. More to this, about other fifty engineers were busy developing Microsoft's Windows phones apps.
What about RIM's BalckBerry?
According to Mr Donahoe, there are only "one or two" its people developing apps for BlackBerry.
At an event this year in June at Stanford University when RIM's subject came up, he told to a group of chief technology officers, "I still use the BlackBerry, but it's not the most developer-friendly platform."
In early November it was seen that he wasn't using BB much any more. Meeting press people then to talk about the holiday shopping season plans he whipped out his iPhone and showed eBay's apps running on it.
More similar stories are common these days among the once-loyal corporate customers of RIM.
On Thursday RIM posted quarterly profit sharply lower than before. The holiday season's BlackBerry shipments were offered a dismal forecast, and also the arrival of new phones has been delayed.
Isn't it frustrating that all the BlackBerry customers haven't also heard anything good from RIM in a long time? If the company doesn’t come up with something new soon then would they become the next palm?
On Friday the price of RIM stock fell on Nasdaq by 11 percent. It was lowest in about eight years.
According to the forecast of Strategy Analytics, the shares of RIM in U.S. smartphone market to go down to 12 percent this year, which is a sharp drop from 2007. Apple is expected to take a 24 percent share this year in the U.S. smartphone market.
RIM had 44 percent share in U.S. smartphone market in 2007. Then Apple had just started selling smartphones.
