As explained in my previous blog few days back about failure of few smartphones and tablets, excess of everything is always bad. When there is excess of products in the market then elimination of some products is almost certain and this is precisely the reason that RIM – manufacturers of BlackBerry, who have introduced almost 37 handsets in a span of three years, are facing the heat now as sales of their handsets have dried up. They are not able to compete with open ended smartphones on Android platform and with iPhone of Apple Inc.
Their recent outages in the services added fuel to the fire and whatever little confidence was left in their devices, vanished all of a sudden and even their faithful users have switched over to Android and iPhone. Even RIM had not imagined in their wildest dream that the situation will turn so worse so swiftly. PlayBook tablet was another disaster for the company, with the 7″ inch tablet sold at a damaging loss after customers failed to take an interest.
Earlier this year (2011), BlackBerry also ran into trademark difficulties for the new operating system – BBX – and renamed the phones BB10 to avoid a dispute.
Mike Lazaridis, one of the company’s co CEOs, said the BlackBerry 10 phones will need a new chipset that will not be available until mid 2012, so the company expects the new phones to ship late in the year.“We have experienced a delay”, he said. Analysts say RIM’s future depends on the new software.
RIM said BlackBerry sales will fall sharply in the holiday quarter, providing further evidence that it is struggling to compete with the iPhone and smartphones running Android.
In order to survive in the fast moving market of smartphones, RIM will have to think seriously of changing the platform for its handsets and in order to remain in the rat race, they cannot afford to sit idle for too long.
