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.