[Mister-E]

And what's your overall profit on those shares so far, OP?

Three grand in the hole, but the money I made on my Apple shares more then offset it.

[Fuzzballz]

sorry to hear that

[johnyblaze]

M$ have announced massive improvements when it comes to WP in the enterprise, full disk encryption, device management and an apps page that IT departments can use to push apps directly to their users phones. Given how huge MS is in the enterprise market, I think RIM is gonna be feeling some heat there pretty soon.

[Rooster99]

I'm not saying I don't agree, but if you're going to offer vague pronouncements like this I'm going to call you on it.

"OS with everything complete" - A fair shot considering what the PB was missing on launch, but it HAS caught up since then.

"adequate ecosystem" - Defined by what? Number of available apps? Granted, that's a valuable, though not complete indicator. Let's assume that RIM can get all of the top 100 apps on its current "hit list" (which I'm not, but just for the sake of discussion), would that be adequate? Or are there other elements that would be missing?

RIM already has a decent music store, and a not-bad-but-definitely-serviceable app store. What else do they need to at least keep them in the hunt?

PB hasn't caught up. Skype is huge and isn't there yet - and I'm speaking as a business user. We're a recruiting firm and use Skype all the time with clients and candidates. We bought a PB to test and can't use it for that reason. Another is a solid RDP program - not Splashtop, but true RDP. There's only one I've found and it doesn't quite do what we want.

Even Berries haven't caught up - Garmin isn't available for OS7 and there don't seem to be any plans to do so. I was a Garmin user until I switched to my 9860, now I can't be. I use Pocket Informant for my PIM and while they have an OS7 version they have now ceased all Berry development - PB and phone.

And please don't tell me Berries and PB have equivalents. I don't want to use Magellan - I know Garmin, I have favourites set up, etc. I don't want to use AOL - everyone knows and uses Skype, and I have no desire to "train" my clients just because RIM can't attract a mainstream developer. The native Berry phone PIM sucks, and the PB PIM doesn't sync directly to Outlook.

Those are just a few examples - there are other apps we'd like to use that are available for iOS and Android, but not Blackberry.

All the apps mentioned are mainstream. To me, an adequate ecosystem includes them, and a good indicator of ecosystem health is that when an app is released by a mainstream company it's released for that ecosystem along with iOS and Android.

- R.

[robsteve]

I just realised a great error in the above analysis. It assumes revenue is just for devices. RIM makes a lot of money on services, a net 3.4 billion last year. Things are a lot better then for RIM's survival. I will try to update these numbers later today.

A lot of people miss this. RIM gets paid for every active user/phone on their network. Even a phone sold five years ago is still providing revenue if it is active on the BlackBerry network.