Apologies for title's reference to the theme song from the Mary Tyler Moore Show,
but when will people stop saying “Sure RIM is a great company but there
are only xx million Blackbery users?”. Maybe today is the day after RIM
said it expects to have five million subscribers by end of fiscal 2006
while sales will be about $2-billion. Say what you will about the Treo 700w, et al but the Blackberry remains the
standard for mobile e-mail. Things could really interesting if
RIM can upgrade the Blackberry's telephone and Web browser.
Going back to my riff earlier this week
on the all-in-one wireless device, what about the idea of a Treo iPod
that would feature Treo's strong calendar, contact and Web browser
features
with the 4GB or 6GB of iPod goodness? Do you think Palm and Steve Jobs
can
ever dance now that Palm is dating Microsoft – even if Palm CEO Ed Colligan is giving away Bill Gates' cell phone numbers to anyone who wants it.
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RIM's down 10 per cent today. Obviously somebody disagrees.
One key number not reported today but reported at their annual meeting is the number of enterprise servers installed and the increase in this number during the last quarter. It is these enterprise server installations that should be used as a measure of RIM's business sustainability.
The problems for RIM have nothing to do with their devices or the processor used in them. The newest and most significant threat to RIM comes from Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2. The new capabilities available in this service pack include the ability for an organization to “Push” email and scheduling information (actually any information from an exchange account) to a Pocket PC device.
Some people speculate that this may be a reason that Palm decided to move to the Windows Mobile OS, but I think that such a major move would require a long decision process and the new Service Pack for Exchange Server was only recently released so this may not be the case.