There’s plenty of coverage of RIM’s settlement with NTP around, so I won’t go into the details and I’ll leave the patent issues untouched, for now. While the settlement is an important step for RIM, and they may have gotten off pretty lightly, all things considered, this is merely the first fight in what’s going to be a pretty bloody war — a war over mobile e-mail.
While the NTP spat is out of the way, RIM quantified its damage by warning on its revenue projections, saying the uncertainty was weighing on its business and had cost it sales of 100,000 devices. That’s the short-term damage. The long-term damage is that this whole trial, the specter of an injunction in particular, has served as a massive advertisement for rivals to the Blackberry’s throne.
So many stories have underlined the high cost of switching — which one consultant put at $844 — that RIM’s largely device-dependent platform isn’t looking quite as great as it once did. Push email is pretty much a commodity at this point, but the major differentiation between RIM and its competitors is the number of devices their solutions support. A good chunk of that $844 is from buying new devices to replace Blackberrys — but a solution that can run on a wide variety of handsets, like Good, Visto or others, doesn’t come with that same degree of lock-in. RIM has licensed Blackberry connect to some device manufacturers, but it’s still not yet available on a wide range of handsets.
RIM may have its business back, but it’s faced with a slew of competitors that can do exactly the same things it does, but do them more cheaply and on a wider range of devices — and plenty of devices that offer more open operating systems with better developer support as well. And all of those companies have gotten a hell of a lot of free publicity in exchange for RIM’s $612 million.
[tags]rim, blackberry, ntp, visto, seven, good technology, smartner[/tags]
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