RIM Hopes PlayBook Tablet Can Revive Its Market Position
It seems that Research In Motion is not happy the way people are perceiving their brand, and it is quite clear from the excerpts from a rare interview Mike Lazaridis, one of the chief executives of the company.
“Why is it that people don’t appreciate our profits? Why is it that people don’t appreciate our growth? Why is it that people don’t appreciate the fact that we spent the last four years going global? Why is it that people don’t appreciate that we have 500 carriers in 170 countries with products in almost 30 languages? I don’t fully understand why there’s this negative sentiment, and I just don’t have the time to battle it. Because in the end, what I’ve learned is you’ve just got to prove it over and over and over.”
Lazaridis is really disappointed, and in fact frustrated with the entire situation, especially when their device Blackberry is a phone of choice in the White House, as well as being loved by corporate environments throughout the world. Just last year, RIM sold 52.3 million phones and earned whopping revenue of $924 million. In spite of all these positive figures, RIM is not a first choice for tech savvy people, which is quite intimidating.
The company has all its hopes on its first tablet computer, PlayBook launching on April 19. Although the company is having good hopes from it, some analysts suggest that tablet’s new operating system might prove to be as pivotal to R.I.M.’s future.
The Playbook tablet has a seven-inch display, weighs less than a pound and has a powerful dual-core processor. Having advantage over Apple’s iPad, it also plays Flash-based video and has a battery life of 8 to 10 hours.
Moving ahead, RIM experienced several ups and downs throughout this year. Just last month, it also got the licensing of over 30,000 patents from Intellectual Ventures, a company founded by former Microsoft veterans. It is QNX-based BB OS7, codenamed “Highlander.”
Additionally, it also announced that its tablet will also support Honeycomb apps that indicate that RIM is beginning to abound its OS losing turf to Android and iOS almost by the day.
Finally, RIM also announced its expansion into cloud services, with the Cloud-based BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and plans to support other devices. It is working to become more service based—by decentralizing their enterprise services into the cloud—and have begun to provide interconnection with non-BlackBerry devices.
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