Can RIM Be Third In The Mobile Market
Google and Apple are well-established as the top two players in the global mobile market. Is there room for RIM and other players?
by Max Fawcett
One of the more persistent memes of the last 12 months for Research in Motion (and its beleaguered shareholders) is the idea that there’s room for more than two major players in the global mobile-phone market. The problem, it seems, is that nobody appears to want to occupy that third position.
Despite its recent earnings miss and the death of Steve Jobs, Apple is still doing just fine, growing its market share in virtually every country in the world and delivering popular new products. The Apple iPhone 4s may have initially been viewed as a disappointment by those waiting for a fifth iteration of the popular product, but its sales figures tell a different story – it’s already Apple’s fastest selling model ever. Google, meanwhile, announced another quarter of blowout earnings, with the number of Android handsets closing in on 200 million worldwide.
But that battle for third that was supposed to shape up between Canada’s Research in Motion and the Windows/Nokia alliance has been laughably incompetent. First, there was the recent RIM outage that undermined the company’s longstanding claims to superior security and service delivery. RIM followed that up by announcing that the long-awaited software update to its stillborn PlayBook tablet would not come until 2012, a decision that sent its stock spiraling back towards $20 per share on a day when virtually every other stock in the world was heading in the other direction.
Nokia, though, may actually have managed to outdo RIM. It announced the release of its Lumia 800 phone, which has been dubbed “the first real Windows Phone.” And while it’s a nice looking piece of technology, its name also appears to be a synonym for the word “prostitute” in Spanish. If true – and it appears to be, judging from this story – it’s a blunder reminiscent of Chevrolet’s infamous Nova (no va, in Spanish, means “doesn’t go”), which was predictably met with confusion in Spanish-speaking markets.
If there’s an invisible hand in this particular market, it needs to reach out and slap some sense into these two companies soon. Otherwise, the mobile market really will be a two-horse race.
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