Blackberry in trouble?

This article on Bloomberg seems suggests what we have said here at ‘Sherr Towers’ for a long time now.

The author having responsibility for the setup one of the first UK wide Blackberry services for a mid-size firm in the dying days of the last century has seen the growth of the Blackberry product and service from its birth and for the time it was the greatest thing since sliced bread (sliced bread is pretty good…preferably wholemeal!). The whole concept of having your emails on the go, on your phone, in 1999 was just incredibly cool, even if it was in green & black!

Technology, being the beast that it is, marches on unabated, and cares little who it tramples on along the way. Sadly, RIM are under the boot. They have failed to innovate, or provide anything new in the light of competitors such as Apple, Google and now Microsoft with their new Windows Mobile OS soon to hit the streets.

RIM has specific markets where it is strongest (especially due to the encryption of Blackberry data), but these are shrinking as new players come into these markets.
From a techincal perspecitve, the Blackberry product, specifically the server back-end is now a clunky and archaic affair, by acting as a broker between the email server and the handset, especially when almost every other device can talk directly to the email server (which in most cases is Microsoft Exchange) and provide the same features but in a direct relationship between device and server. The catastrophic failure of the Blackberry network last year aptly demonstrated the weakness in this design, taking out millions of handsets across the globe.

So where next for RIM/Blackberry?

The Blackberry device has some die-hard fans it is said, we can count several of our own clients who swear by their Blackberry devices, despite being offered the alternatives from Apple, Google, Microsoft etc…

The general consensus in ‘Sherr Towers’ is that we are seeing the closing chapter on the Blackberry device as it exists today, once the darling of the tech world, favoured amongst giant corporates. Today, other vendor devices are moving into the IT universe of these organisations and the Blackberry handset will take its place alongside such devices as the Apple Newton.