Over the RIM? Blackberry Use Declines, Stock Price Plummets

Ouch. Sometimes being first is not the most advantageous position in which to find oneself.

Let us remember that Apple itself did not invent the the PC: Steve, Woz and the rest of the gang just made it much more user friendly and, well, cool to be seen with, let alone use. Did the iPad finally put the feisty Canadian out of play? Was that one last development enough to reinforce belief in tech dominance. Perhaps.

This is probably not the end for the Blackberry. This is a world of alliances, acquisitions and second acts. Likely partners? Google, IBM, Tata, any one of ten companies in China...and that' just off the top of our heads. The drama aint over, but the curtain is closing on this particular act. JL

Sean Ludwig reports in VentureBeat:

The sixth-biggest investor in mobile device maker Research in Motion (RIM) told Bloomberg on Friday that it had sold more than half of its holdings in RIM due to market share loss. “We are on the way out,” Stephen Stephen Jarislowsky, chairman of Jarislowsky Fraser Ltd., told Bloomberg. “The stake has been reduced by more than 50% or even more.”

Add this to RIM’s stock price plunging about 20% on Friday and RIM appears to be in some serious trouble. The company’s first quarter earnings report yesterday was essentially all bad news: company revenues were below Wall Street estimates, sales of RIM smartphones were down and dwarfed by the iPhone, new products have been delayed, and the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet shipping just 500,000 units during a launch that did not go smoothly.
RIM’s competition, namely Apple and Google, have increased their presence over the last few years in the smartphone world. But RIM, which targets business users more than average consumers, has been slow to keep up with the types of powerful and innovative hardware its competitors offer.