Future of RIM

This is an interesting conversation going on over on BlackBerryCool under the Weekend Contest, entitled, “Future of RIM“. You could win one of 5 copies of WiseSpent 3.0 if you leave a comment, but more importantly, read the comments that other readers are leaving.

Here is a comment that I left:

I think that RIM is at a critical point that will determine where and how they play in the wireless email market in the future. Today, RIM is the dominate player in the game, however, now that they have proven the business model the big hardware manufacturers like Nokia, Motorola, HP, and Dell and the software developers like Good, Visto, and especially Microsoft, are taking dead aim on mobile email industry.
I think for Research in Motion to stay on top, they are going to do two things. First, RIM makes a lot of their money on hardware sales. Next-Generation BlackBerries will need to stay as secure as they are today, but begin to offer some of the additional features, such as Wi-Fi and removable memory, as these come standard on most of their competitors units.Second, RIM has to do better with their BlackBerry Connect program. BlackBerry Connect has been around for a few years but hasn’t been massively adopted by third party hardware manufacturers, especially not in North America. BlackBerry Enterprise Server is where, in my opinion, Research in Motion needs to focus to maintain their market dominance. If the other hardware manufacturers are making devices that connect to a BES server, that is a win for RIM. When those third party devices don’t connect to BES, this is a loss for RIM in not one, but two categories… Hardware and Software.