In summary Google will win and Blackberry will lose. A quick summary of the three products from a simplified technical point of view.
iPhone is cool and plays music. It surfs the web very well unlike almost any other web capable phone. It will show you the web in miniature as well as your desktop will show you. Except for pages using flash technology. The biggest inherent obstacle for business users is the lack of a keyboard. This means the iPhone user is mostly limited to consuming information. Cool is a major feature here. Everything about this phone is quite cool. It has quite a few applications being developed but Apple seems to want to battle with developers. Microsoft lost a whole generation of developers by doing this “our way or the highway” thing.
The blackberry line is as everyone knows is very good at email. But that is about it. Its web capability is squirlly and nobody that I have ever met uses any of the other applications. Technically it is possible for developers to make things for the blackberry but I don’t see much of this. In my opinion all RIM products are ugly and aimed at 50 year olds who think they are cool but truely truely aren’t. RIM does not seem to have much of an idea that phones are jewelry for some people.
The android is pretty ugly but cooler than anything RIM makes. It has the RIM keyboard and the iPhone web capability. But Google is doing a good job of wooing developers to make apps for the android. This will probably allow the android to be all things to all people. Quite simply it will have all the best features in both the iPhone and the various RIM products. Some coolness, a keyboard for email and stuff, and great web browsing.
The various reviews of the new Android phone compare it mostly to the iPhone and a few compare it to the Blackberry. Most of these reviews either call it a tie or they give the Android a close second place. A very few call it a winner. None of this is relevant until you consider that this is google’s first phone. What will their second phone be like?
The people who I see running around with blackberries are government people, finance people, and real-estate people. The last two groups are taking a huge hit both in jobs and budgets. Thus I foresee a general drop in all smart phone use but mostly blackberries. This will hurt the android somewhat in that it won’t be the raving success that might have come its way with a boom economy but overall this might benefit Google. From a technical point of view it looks like the Android might be cheaper to run than blackberries and iPhones and due to what google is providing to geeks it will soon have applications that will cover any software feature found on the other phones. So if you like some software feature on your favorite phone it will be matched and bettered by the android.
So I see a market that will be looking to cut back hurting blackberry and iPhone but not Android as they have doubtfully built up much dependancy on their tiny market share where as RIM basically has a single product and will be seriously hurt by any drop in revenues. iPhone will be less affected by this but it will give their many competitors such as samsung to catch up with cheaper units. This will hurt things like RIM’s R&D and general moral.
Then I see some companies adopting some Androids to cut cost. This won’t amount to much but it will get people exploring non RIM options. Then when the market rebounds people will not all return to the RIM family. Many will go to Android for both capabilities and cost.
So the timing of this bust will only put nails in RIMs coffin and open a door to Google. I don’t see this as being a huge revenue generator for Google but I do see this as being a massive revenue eraser for RIM.
So in summary Google will do OK; RIM will die a slow death; and Apple will just continue along.
PS My prediction is the RIM will fade in spurts. Basically look at the history of companies like Novell and Sun. They just sort of faded from relevance. Once in a while they would make headlines with a sizable layoff but due to a lack of any crushing debt they just sort of faded from the scene. One customer base that probably won’t switch and will keep RIM plodding along will be governments. Due to the lack of real impact by the economy they won’t cut way back and since they generally are very old school people who are very uncool they will keep on and on with their blackberries. That should fit in well with their various Novell and Sun systems.
Tags: AAPL, Android, blackberry., GOOG, iPhone, Java, Novell, RIMM, Sun
I think apple should start making efforts to attract more developers since geeks are already in love with the android promise of open platform and if google can deliver them at a good enough price point then there will be some kind of explosive take off as most of the people are fed up with only having a call-to facility on their phones when most of the phone can be made to do much more.
Nice review. My brother is a 46 year old stockbroker and your review correctly nailed him a blackberry user. My wife, who works in the fashion industry, is an iPhone girl. It’s a status thing for her crowd. Also, her crowd was iPod addicted before there was the iPhone so it was a huge feeder product. Then there are the vast majority of us. We shop based on functionality and price. Cool is nice but will not pay much extra for it. The Android will be cheaper. It has a nice screen with a keyboard. But what about the apps? The GPS turn by turn navigation recently announced is a huge step in the right direction.
Oh yeah, RIM sales to business users have been up all through the economic slump. This is why armchair peanut gallery folks who ’saw these people do this or that’ make lousy analysts, at best. I’m not sure if I like the fact that the Internet has given a voice to every teenager that can click ’start’ on WordPress …
[Editor's comment.] Installing and configuring Wordpress isn’t actually that easy and the creator of this blog has been developing software longer than any teenager has been alive. This site isn’t called the Technical Fact Repository. It has the key word prognostications in the title. Guesses based on observations by someone who has been developing commercial software for 27 years. The same sort of guesses that I make every day when it comes to things like (what should I name this button so as to confuse the fewest number of users? How should I structure the system so that it doesn’t blow up in 5 years?). In the past I knew that companies like Sun were basically zombies (I loved Sun in the 90’s). I knew that fuel cells wouldn’t go anywhere any time soon (they do have a future). And I knew that Y2K was going to be a huge steaming pile of hype. I am not always right but I am rarely wrong on tech. Non tech, ignore me as I was sure gold was reaching a peak a few weeks back. A good example of a tech failure I got wrong was Transmeta. I loved those guys and their product. What I didn’t keep in mind is that fighting Intel is basically like Iceland trying a D-Day style invasion on the continental US. Iceland might spend a few happy moments on the beach and even occupy some land until the US Army actually realizes they are there and bothers to show up.