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The company that makes Blackberry smart phones says it is withdrawing from the consumer market to concentrate on business customers.
Source : BBC News
Gracious in defeat
. Although somewhat odd just after they launched a high end consumer product in Harrods 6 days ago source : crackberry. Strikes me as a company that’s long been at odds with itself, never taking the Bold move (pardon the pun) to find its own direction in the consumer market.
According to figures in the last quarter rim shipped 11.1 million units but at 30% or more less than the panned average selling price (ASP). Apple in the same time shipped 37.04 million iPhones (source : cnet without having to slash prices.
In the same period 500,000 playbooks were sold in this period which is amazing as you would
think company executives and IT departments would lap them up. Ok they would of done if small essentials like email push had been working out of the box. The iPad, well that smashed out just over 15 million.
AT&T are also trying a similar move now with the Nokia Lumia 800 launch about to happen.
Nokia’s North American head Chris Weber did say, “To re-enter the U.S. market, we know we have to be aggressive.”
Seems this means selling the phone for a reasonable cost but more importantly offering cash incentives to store staff to sell these units over anything else.
Never once have I been into a mobile phone store and tried to be sold an iPhone. It’s always been android with an occasional nod that “there’s a windows phone out as well”
Wonder if that will change shortly?
Update.. And it has. With this latest press release.
“The claim that RIM has said it will withdraw from the consumer market is wholly misleading,” Patrick Spence, managing director of global sales and regional marketing, said in an emailed statement today.
“Whilst we announced plans to refocus our efforts on our core strengths, and on our enterprise customer base, we were very explicit that we will continue to build on our strengths to go after targeted consumer segments.
“We listed BBM, as well as the security and manageability of our platform, amongst our strengths,”
Looks like Rim can’t get a press release right let alone a product.
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