Ask HN: Why doesn't RIM have any direct competitors?

5 points·EricBurnett··6 comments

Research in Motion is one of the fastest growing companies in the world, primarily due to its dominance in the business mobile phone market. While it is certainly moving in on the consumer market (I have one myself), the reverse doesn't seem to be true. Why are no other manufacturers making dedicated business phones? It is a multi-billion dollar market, after all.

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RIMM will see its market share eroded by Google, Apple, and Microsoft over the next 5 years. So will Microsoft. I think Microsoft, in the next 5 years, will need to buy RIMM to stay in the mobile sector.

The consumer and business smart phone markets are converging.

What is the difference between a "business smart phone" and a "consumer smart phone" anymore? Smart phone's used to be inherently business focused due to their higher cost and complexity, but the iPhone and Android have brought smart phones to consumers.

Thus I don't believe we have a "business smart phone" market any longer; instead we have a "smart phone" market.

When I joined my group pretty much everyone was either using a blackberry (the majority) or Windows Mobile phones. Today the majority are iPhones. Thats for a group that has grown a lot since then too, so one could easily argue that the other manufacturers (at least Apple) are making inroads into the business phone market without the need to make dedicated devices.

RIM still have the killer-app for business mobile phones, which is simple corporate email integration, sorted with relative ease.

Because blackberry's integrate well with outlook.

android's integration with Google Apps makes it attractive to businesses already using Google Apps.

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