» How is that any kind of rebuttal?

A free competitor in the software world can have more users, but that doesn't necessarily mean your business is failing. Similarly, Apple has had many fewer users than Windows for a long time but it's doing just fine compared to most Windows hardware vendors.

Other phone vendors have moved from Windows Mobile & Symbian to Android, partly due to the free O.S. The customer profile of Symbian or Windows Mobile customers is likely not that of RIM customers, so it doesn't necessarily drive RIM's failure (although it could certainly increase the odds). He's looking for the problem that will mean RIM's failure.

The sexy marketing issue is similar. If RIM has survived okay up until now without it, good marketing might not cause the business to fail. It will certainly add to the danger, but the issue is again discovering the likely primary cause of failure.

That cause seems to be saturation of RIM's main customer segment(s) and an inability to grow outside of those segments. (Obviously, bad marketing and free alternatives are possible root causes of the latter!)

Please don't be driven up the wall - it's just an opinion :)

>> "A free competitor in the software world can have more users, but that doesn't necessarily mean your business is failing."

But this isn't like free end user software. An Android phone isn't "free" to the end user. People are paying money for Android phones, instead of spending that money to buy BlackBerries. The fact that the OS is free to the manufacturer providing the phones is of no consequence. What is of consequence is that there's this new player in the smartphone market that is gobbling up marketshare that used to belong in part to RIM. I don't see how saying, "oh, that was going to happen anyway" makes the argument any less stinging.

Agreed, not to the user. But I would imagine MS extracting a fair amount of cash from companies using their operating system. That would provide an incentive to move to a free-as-in-beer-and-speech system.

I guess he is pointing out that - Although Andriod is gaining market share, it isn't exactly eating into potential RIM market share. Other way to put it is that both RIM and Android target different set of customers.

P.S :- I am not making the above assertion. Just writing what i understood from reading that article.

Sorry for the confusion. What I was trying to say was that I think neither the rise of Android nor bad marketing are likely to be the death of RIM. They may well be damaging, but in my opinion they are a sideshow compared to the central problems.

Android is obviously an important competitor to everybody else in the mobile market, but in my opinion the market is heavily segmented, so it's possible for several companies to grow simultaneously.

And RIM's products sold well for years despite the company's lame marketing. Yes, Apple has raised the bar on smartphone marketing, but if (as BusinessWeek implied) you have to out-market Apple in order to succeed in smartphones, everyone else ought to pack up and quit now.