Verizon only sees room for three smartphone platforms in this market and doesn’t envision Blackberry as one of them.
Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam was at a Goldman Sachs conference this week, where he laid out what he thinks will happen in the near future for the mobile space.
He noted that although Android and the iPhone are obviously the champions of the industry right now, there is a need for a third platform. The question is what that platform will be.
“The carriers are beginning to coalesce around the need for a third ecosystem. Over the next 12 months I think it will coalesce and you will start to see one emerge as a legitimate third ecosystem. In my opinion, it’ll be between RIM and Microsoft, and I expect Microsoft to come out victorious,” he said.
Before Android and the iPhone, the mobile market had become quite inflexible. It used to take years before any sort of significant change could happen.
But in this environment, Blackberry market share has been completely slashed, losing double-digit market share on a regular basis.
It’s not only because of external factors, but also because Research in Motion has failed to keep up with its competition. When the company unveiled Blackberry 7, it seemed unbelievably out of touch, praising its new features as the second coming of Christ when in reality they were the same features that Google and Apple introduced years ago.
Then there was the Blackberry Playbook, which critics saw as having huge potential but ultimately failing because you needed a Blackberry phone to unlock all the features.
The company’s potentially last hope will come next year when it launches new smartphones based on the Playbook operating system, which for the first time is built from the ground up as opposed to an incremental upgrade over the decades-old Blackberry software.
But it may be too little too late as the Blackberry brand has become tarnished as old and out of touch with the current mobile ecosystem.
