They snooze, they lose (lost?).
RIM Strengths: keyboard, corporate relationships, extremely happy users, historic hardware excellence
Weaknesses: shitty UI, no app ecosystem
Motorola was in this situation but with fewer strengths two years ago. Do you really think that RIM would not benefit from being able to say:
"As always, the best keyboard in the business. Now, with access to Amazon App Marketplace / Android Marketplace!"
To my mind it's entirely possible that RIM could bankroll itself through this cycle with their current cash, but if they want to compete, aggressively, they should probably adopt the android ecosystem as a compatibility layer.
An android phone that works excellently with Blackberry Server and has a blackberry keyboard would be EXTREMELY appealing to a broad range of corporate buyers, and many power-users as well.
JQuery was barely supported at all until the latest OS release, which isn't being backported to the vast majority of their recent hardware. Because developers are stuck catering to the lowest common denominator (and because the upgrade cycle is a lot slower in the corporate world), any improvements are going to be moot for quite some time before most users can see any benefit (or before developers are willing to invest time developing apps for BB OS 6).
The pre-webkit browser's specifications were written to behave similarly to IE6, but somehow managed to even fail at that. It's a browser that's barely even compatible with itself. Simply put, you cannot develop JS-based webapps for it.
Developing a web-based BB app is also a weird and bewildering experience. Development needs to be done entirely within Eclipse, documentation is sparse/awful, and the entire development process is never laid out clearly anywhere. The code signing requirements are particularly onerous. The simulators are handy, because of the many device-specific peculiarities, but never seem to actually work properly themselves.
RIM have dug themselves into a hole; they are faced with either continuing to support their current (awful) platform, or completely alienating their existing installed base. RIM really has no good options at this point, and a bit of a chicken/egg situation. No good apps until everyone has a phone supporting the "new" platform (whatever that is/will be), but nobody will buy phones on the new platform because there are no apps for it.
They need someone to cut the Gordian Knot and make a clean breast of things. Who was Elop's counterpart over at Google??
As for developers....if the development environment is good, they will come to RIM for the money. Big corporations wouldn't think twice about paying $100 to $500 for certain apps for a large chunk of employees.
Playbook apps have lots of glitches.. crash for no reason. Users are also getting 0.5 gig software updates every couple of days that brick the device for 30 - 60 mins.
This all indicates poorly managed software teams that are under too much schedule pressure to produce reliable results. Also indicates a broken QA process where RIM thinks it's fine to ship kit that doesn't work properly.
I call deep cultural problems that can't be fixed without leadership changes.
You should really reconsider how you use that term.
The question is not can they, but will they.
They make great hardware, and still have a vastly superior keyboard experience to any softkey phone anywhere. They have buckets of cash, and had great, really great earnings last year.
They have an ecosystem problem. This would be simple to remedy -- they just need to commit to HTML5 for apps, maybe adopt jquery mobile as a significantly-supported project.
Staff a small, awesome webkit team, and start making it dead simple to deploy to Blackberry. Start a webstore to compete with Chrome's webstore, but this one lets you take it with you on your Blackberry.
Second internal team would be dalvik support, adopting the android ecosystem. RIM never really made a ton of money on the 'app' ecosystem; this would put them on equal footing when being evaluated against Android.
I'll await my offer from the RIM strategy folks. : )