RIM PlayBook Stuck Between A Rock (Apple) And A Hard Place (Android)

Apple and Android Doom Another Tablet

Research In Motion (RIM) the company behind Blackberry smartphones and the fairly new PlayBook tablet computer has been getting hammered by Wall Street, most recently around an announcement that they have had to take a nearly half a billion dollar write down due to disappointing sales of their Playbook tablets

Actually according to the NY Times article, recently the ill-fated tablets have seen a pick up in sales, but that is due to RIM marking the $500 dollar device down to $200.  When the estimates are that each device costs RIM $250 to $400 to make, that is a tough model to swallow.  You can't make that up on volume. It would seemt that the other shoe will fall soon and we will see PlayBook either being discontinued or becoming a container as yet another Android tablet.

This is very similar to the experience of HP with their WebOS based Touchpads.  HP cut bait pretty quickly, after just a few weeks of the tablet being released. Many including myself think they gave up on the tablet too soon. But in the case of RIM they gave it a little while longer, but much of the blame has to lay at their own feet.

What were they thinking releasing the tablet without the ability to use the Blackberry email service for which RIM is known? Then when the promised functionality was not delivered for the fall and now pushed to Feburary (granted RIM had other fires to put out), you have to agree that you can't blame the market for not rushing out and snapping these up.

The Playbook, like the Touchpad and the Cisco Cius was supposed to hit Apple where it wasn't, in the enterprise. These tablets supposedly had enterprise class features that would make it more palatable to enterprise IT shops and regulate the iPad as a nice toy to play with at home.  But with the trend of BYOD (bring your own device) powering smartphones and tablets in the office, the Apple devices have snuck in the back door and made an end run around the enterprise tablet folks.

Fundamentally the only model which can be successful against Apple is one that offers a wide range of applications to challenge what is available on the iPad (that is the only drawback to using the HP Touchpads I bought).  In order to have that range of applications and the functionality they offer you either have to be open, a la' Android or you have to be really, really big (can you say Microsoft) to drag enough developers into making the apps that you need available.

Companies without the developer girth of Microsoft (and that is most of them), who don't go open are doomed to fail in the tablet and smartphone market. I think this is a fundamental fact of the market.

In the meantime not even the Android tablets to date have really displaced Apple in this market. But I think that will change as more innovation comes to the Android tablet marketplace. This innovation is accelerated by the it being open allowing for more people to get their hands on the code and experiment. An inherent advantage to the open model.

For RIM itself this is just more bad news on top of bad news. From a position of owning the smartphone space, they have seen their share fritter away. The app store and Android just overwhelmed RIMs email centric phones. By the time they realized it, it was too little, too late. Many of the iPhone killers they have brought to market were rushed and still rough around the edges.  Then of course having a few highly publicized outages didn't help things either.

Recently, RIM has tried a "if you can't beat them, join them strategy" by announcing that they will support management of Apple and Android devices. This allows them to capitalize on one of their strengths, enterprise class management of mobile devices.  It may be that RIM gets out of the device market all together and just becomes a software or SaaS based mobile device management firm.

OK, so who is next to challenge the winner and still champion iPad?

• Mobile
• Smartphones
• Amazon
• Android
• HP
• RIM
• tablets
• TouchPad
• webOS