A lot of comparisons have been made between RIM and Palm, and RIM and Apple, but in my personal opinion, RIM seems to be closer to Saab, the former car manufacturer from what I gather. I watched this Top Gear final tribute of Saab last month, and some of the points they brought up seemed eerily similar to RIM's.
You can watch the Youtube clip here [YT]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qnfSHnrL90[/YT]
Basically to sum up, Saab had it's share of misses, however they were committed to certain ideals, that in theory makes perfect sense. One that was brought up in this video was safety, (and you can see with the inverted crash test how insanely committed they were). While other automakers were pumping in money to make their cars more appealing with less regard to safety, Saab pushed on. They appealed to a wealthy clientele. In the end, not enough people cared about safety over other aspects of the car and they went under.
Now obviously RIM and Saab are in two different fields, but their obsession with certain details has brought down both companies. RIM is alive now, but is now posting a loss, bleeding market share in it's biggest market, and has outdated products with no definitive future. Security, battery life and highly integrated email/calendar system is definitely important, and should be the priority for everyone in a government department, to companies dealing with sensitive information (if you were to ignore the common user), but it's proving that it's not. Obviously there will be a very small minority that value these qualities over anything else, but rarely does a multi-billion dollar company survive on serving such a small group of people.
I read a story a few months back about a presentation Jim B. gave to some American provider when introducing a new phone. He announced that unlike the iPhone, the BlackBerry would survive on a single charge for days. The executives of the American cell service provider were confused. If the battery lasted for so long, it would mean that they would sell less chargers and spare batteries. If Android has proven anything, its that people are willing to put up with 10 hr battery life for other features.
If car industry can survive without safety obsessed then mobile industry should survive without signal obsessed. Let's hope RIM delivers enough shine and glossiness that costumers decide to go for it because i would hate to switch to a phone that looses signal when I hold it in my left hand or the one that looses signal when I walk into...any closed space because 100000 of my apps would become useless.
Thing is, no, there really aren't that many parallels. If anything, RIM would be like the Ford of the car industry.
Ford much like RIM launched people into the mass car market. RIM did the smartphone market. At one point Ford dominated the world car market. RIM dominated the world smartphone market. Ford seeing new and innovative competitors come along saw their market share fall HUGE!!! They tried launching innovative models in response to new competition like the original Taurus (Storm comes to mind from RIM) which sold well but turned so many of those buyers away from the company.
Hopefully like Ford RIM's story will be one of a turnaround championed as the All American(Canadian in this case) company with high sales and record profits, not one of liquidation.
