Monday Note

Much has been written about RIM’s gloomy quarterly numbers, most of it sensible (with one brain flatulence exception). The attention is a testament—an apt word—to the place RIM once occupied. From its humble pager origins, the BlackBerry, rightly nicknamed CrackBerry, became the de rigueur device of enterprise users. Like most former BlackBerry fans, I have my own fond memories of its world-class mail/contacts/calendar PIM service and of the impeccable OTA (Over The Air) synchronization that freed my wife from her Palm USB cable and HotSync travails.

As always, Horace Dediu digests the numbers for us, adds insight, and comes up with a somber conclusion (emphasis added):

The selection of tools for workers by a group that claims to understand their needs better than they do is an archaic concept.
This was true even in 2005 when RIM began targeting consumers. It was then that they saw the writing on the wall–that their enterprise business was being commoditized. All of RIM’s growth since has been in consumer segments. By abandoning that trajectory RIM is effectively giving up on growth. And giving up on growth is simply giving up.

For the first time in seven years, RIM lost money, $125M; revenue is down 25% from a year ago; unit volume decreased by 11% from the previous quarter. The only somewhat positive sign is that cash increased by $610M leaving RIM with $2.1B in its coffers, a fact preeminently featured in their press release. The message is clear: Look, we’ve got plenty of cash to last us until “late 2012” when we’ll be back with new BB10-powered smartphones.

This is a dubious proposition.

RIM will undoubtedly undergo another two or three quarters of marketshare erosion and losses. Last quarter’s combination of positive cash flow in spite of losses can’t be repeated indefinitely, there’s only so much inventory you can liquidate—at a loss—before you see the bottom of the cash register.

This isn’t to say that Thorsten Heins, RIM’s new CEO, isn’t making an effort, starting with housecleaning: Much to everyone’s relief, former co-CEO Jim Balsillie is “severing all ties with the BlackBerry maker” after a brief stay on the Board when dethroned in January. Jim Rowan, the former co-COO (Heins was the other half before becoming CEO), is also leaving RIM. More significantly, software CTO David Yach is sailing away after 13 years at the helm. Nobody accused RIM of making poor quality hardware, it’s the outmoded and late software that fell the smartphone leader.

For too long, RIM execs (and not just David Yach) didn’t heed the software threat from Google and Apple, they thought their enterprise franchise was impregnable. But by 2010, reality could no longer be ignored; RIM panicked and looked for an OS to replace their aging software engine. They found QNX, a UNIX-like system hatched at the University of Waterloo next door and used by its then-owner, Harman International, for real-time audio and infotainment embedded applications. Dating from the early eighties, QNX is mature and well-tested — but no more adept as a smartphone OS than a vanilla Linux distro. Certainly, you’ll find Linux code at the bottom of the Android stack, but what makes Android successful are its thick, rich layer of frameworks that are indispensable to application developers.

When RIM bought QNX from Harman, the OS offered little or nothing of such vital smartphone app frameworks. David Yach’s team had to build them from the ground up (or, perhaps, adapt some from the Open Source world). This doesn’t happen quickly—ask Google why they acquired Android, or look at Apple’s years of stealth iOS development based on its own OS X. The difficulty in engineering a fully-functional foundation on which to build competitive apps explains why RIM’s “Amateur Hour Is Over” PlayBook tablet lacked a native email client when it was released last spring. And this is why the new BB10 phones are slated for ‘‘late 2012”. By that time, Samsung and Apple will have newer software and hardware—and an even larger market share.

The trouble for RIM is simply stated: Too little too late, while the money runs out. If only the cure were as easily put.

We won’t dwell on the contrast between what Heins said in his first press conference as CEO in January (“Stay the Course”) and the changes he now claims are necessary. He has had time to assess the situation and has declared “We Can’t Be All Things To All People”, by which he means abandoning consumer-oriented multimedia initiatives, a retreat Horace Dediu equates to a wholesale giving up on growth, to becoming hopeless.

For my part, I can’t help but wonder: What did Thorsten Heins see, say, and do since he joined RIM in 2007, right when the Jesus Phone came out? At the time, as his bio points out, he was Senior VP of the BlackBerry Handheld Business unit…

Today, RIM’s new CEO isn’t looking away. In public statements last week, he made it clear that all options are on the table. We can ignore the possibility that RIM might find licensees for its OS (what OS?). This leaves RIM with a single option: Sell the company…but to whom? Asus, Samsung, HTC? Why not ZTE and Huawei while we’re at it? None of this makes sense, these are not necrophiliac companies, they’re happily riding Android.

Disregard the talk of buying RIM for its alleged patent portfolio. This is the company that, after years of fight, had to pay NTP more than $600M, and Visto more than $260M in patent settlements. In any event, as the Nortel example shows, one can buy patents without getting saddled with the company.

Of course, there is one intriguing possibility left: Microsoft could do to RIM what it did to Nokia. They could convince RIM to abandon its unlikely-to-succeed “native” software effort and become the second prong in Microsoft’s effort to regain significance in the smartphone wars. We can picture the headlines: RIM Joins Nokia in Adopting Windows Phone, Microsoft Now Firmly Back in the Race…

We’ll soon know if Microsoft, after toying a few times with a RIM acquisition, now finds a more realistic management team and Board sitting across from them at the negotiating table.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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