Research in Motion will no longer be an independent company by the end of the first quarter of 2013, according to Eric Jackson, manager of Ironfire Capital.
Jackson did not mince his words during a podcast interview with Business Insider. “It’s a bad software company,” he said, adding that he didn’t believe RIM was capable of changing quickly enough to save itself.
Part of the problem, he said, is that it has “bad cofounders, and they’re going to drive this company straight into the ground.” Jackson does not hold any shares of RIM, although he had previously shorted the stock.
RIM just announced that the first device using its new BlackBerry OS 7, the Torch 9810, will be available by the end of August. It hopes to prevent current users from migrating to other, more popular smartphones by including a 3.2-inch touch screen with a slide out keyboard, 1.2-gigahertz processor, 5-megapixel camera and 8 gigabytes of built-in storage. The Torch 9860 and Bold 9900, will follow later in 2011, with an update of the operating system and software expected during 2012.
No matter how sophisticated and excellent the new BlackBerrys are, however, Jackson does not believe the parent company will survive. RIM now has slightly less than 10 percent of market share, a drop Jackson said may well be impossible to turn around.
Related Link:
Business Insider post and podcast – http://tinyurl.com/44u3twf
I couldn’t disagree with this more. RIM has a solid lineup of great smartphones coming out that should be able to carry them through this transition period to their QNX-powered devices. Once those get released Research In Motion should be able to get along just fine. Every major tech company has had to go through a rough transition period at some point in their life. Look at Apple, when they went through theirs, they almost went bankrupt. RIM still has a lot of fight left in them not to mention the fact that no one is even on the same level as them in terms of security capabilities which is a fact that is constantly being overlooked.
Producing competent smartphones with a weak ecosphere isn’t enough when other companies are producing even more appealing products with a far richer environment. The reality is that RiM is not just in a transition: they are in a protracted recovery where they are losing irretrievable market share every day. Their corporate structure remains in denial, failing to learn from realities, and still believing that the lunacy of co-CEOs makes perfect sense. This is tragic to watch, particularly being one of our North American companies, who could have been the current market leader, instead of late follower.