RIM makes a play for its future
The Canadian technology icon has bet a lot on its new device – the PlayBook tablet. Failure could make the company a historical footnote.
The PlayBook is a part of the blueprint for taking RIM deeper into the consumer market, as well as finding growth in its traditional base of government and corporate clients. It’s an audacious strategy. If it succeeds, RIM just might regain the ground it has lost in the smart phone market, while finding new sources of revenue. And one day the PlayBook may come to replace the universal remote control, as the tablet already has done in Mr. Lazaridis’s own living room.
But if the strategy fails, then arguably so does RIM. At the very least, it would relegate it to No. 3 status for a long time to come, a poor cousin to Apple and Google – two companies that five years ago were not even in RIM’s business of wireless communications. It would also damage Canada’s prospects for a more innovative economy.
I am betting that RIM’s PlayBook will be a huge bomb, and will crater the company’s future as an independent. I could see Microsoft buying them for a nickel afterward, and making RIM just some software that works on Microsoft — and Mokia — phones.
