[jonnathanson]

"RIM is spending a lot of time designing an OS that will appeal to everyone. I think they are going to find its going to be used by no one."

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.

[gnaffle]

The problem though, is that owning the consumer market gives iOS and Android a tremendous advantage in terms of revenue, app selection and mindshare. That robust enterprise software is, in many cases, already there for iOS with apps such as iWork.

There will always be a market for keyboard devices or other niches, but I don't think that market is anywhere big enough to sustain RIM at its present size. I think sales of Android devices with keyboards show that.

[jonnathanson]

You're probably right, and if I were a betting man, I'd throw my chips on your side of the fence here. That said, doubling down on enterprise certainly seems like a better path forward for RIM than being a mass market iOS also-ran.

The other big issue RIM has -- and it may be a fatal issue -- is that Blackberry is just a device; it's not a platform. Not really. The big names (and startups/indies) in enterprise solutions aren't designing for it, or at least not exclusively. There isn't a total RIM solution that includes the Blackberry ecosystem as a unifying hub. Instead, there's just the Blackberry device itself, and the device is currently in a sorry state.