Blackberry - Doomed To Repeat Apple's Rocky Road?

[Ed Hansberry]

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/SiliconInsider/story?id=750595&ad=true

"Here's a small company in a technology backwater selling a klugey portable pager to an equally small market. Then it makes a few modifications to its product, and Wham! It has one of the hottest new electronic devices on the planet. Movie stars carry it, corporate tycoons sit through billion-dollar negotiations tapping its keyboard, and even its goofy name, BlackBerry, enters the language as defining an era of wired wheeler dealers."

This is an interesting article that shows some parallels in the Blackberry rise to dominance with the Apple II, Palm Pilot and Atari video game systems, each king in their day, but relatively quickly set aside by late comers with better technological offerings. Will RIM's Blackberry suffer the same fate? It also offers some interesting suggestions for RIM to survive into the next wave of wireless messaging.

[Ed Hansberry]

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/SiliconInsider/story?id=750595&ad=true

"Here's a small company in a technology backwater selling a klugey portable pager to an equally small market. Then it makes a few modifications to its product, and Wham! It has one of the hottest new electronic devices on the planet. Movie stars carry it, corporate tycoons sit through billion-dollar negotiations tapping its keyboard, and even its goofy name, BlackBerry, enters the language as defining an era of wired wheeler dealers."

This is an interesting article that shows some parallels in the Blackberry rise to dominance with the Apple II, Palm Pilot and Atari video game systems, each king in their day, but relatively quickly set aside by late comers with better technological offerings. Will RIM's Blackberry suffer the same fate? It also offers some interesting suggestions for RIM to survive into the next wave of wireless messaging.

[bobmay]

I would imagine push email, calendar, contacts will become a feature set on every cell phone, serviced by every carrier, and ISP of choice. Relegated to just another standard feature that will be expected by all cell phone customers. Will probably expect it to be a free also. So I think it is right to beleve RIM better have a different product in their back pocket to survive.

[LarDude]

Originally Posted by Ed Hansberry

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/SiliconInsider/story?id=750595&ad=true

"Here's a small company in a technology backwater selling a klugey portable pager to an equally small market."

Small company, klugey portable pager, small market : agreed.
Technology backwater?? Does he know many M$ grunts or Silicon Valley serfs come from Waterloo? The Univ. of Waterloo has a great reputation in computer sciences (btw, I'm not from that area nor did I attend U.Waterloo).