Future of Blackberry Smartphones: Are They Hear To Stay?
There has been a lot of speculation on the notion that blackberry (RIM-Research in Motion) will soon go out of business and that it will lay off 2000 workers. This is ofcourse due to increased competition from Google and Apple making Blackberry’s domination over smartphones no longer visible. This may be because they did not embrace touch screen designs, or an open app market quickly enough, causing iPhone and Android devices to take an ever increasing share of their business. The article http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/04/03/rim-going-out-of-business_n_1400838.html does give solid reasons for blackberry going out of business. However, while these opinions formed by the media and the audience might be true, I firmly believe that this won’t be the case as Blackberry is still the device of choice for corporate users owing to the Blackberry Push email service which makes the device receive emails instantly, instead of waiting around for a sync request. Also, even if RIM were to fail, the Blackberry brand name, patents, software designs, and other assets will not disappear. Another tech giant might buy them out or something, but we will always have a Blackberry device group. Worse case scenario with Blackberry might be a repetition of what happened with Palm which designed a super device operating system while they were bleeding cash. Eventually HP bought them out and continued making cell phones using Palm’s webOS device platform.
Again, this would be only probable if Blackberry fails to turn sales around. I am pretty confident that even with declining market sales, Blackberry is here to stay for atleast another 10-15 years.