Research in Motion, the company that makes Blackberry devices, has just scaled back its sales forecasts for the near future.
And not surprisingly, it’s causing even more trouble for the mobile brand that is already suffering from seemingly inevitable obsolescence.
But it is Charlie Wolf who had perhaps the most stinging barb for RIM, asking the rhetorical question in a note, “What do you do when your one trick no longer works?”
Wolf said RIM’s one trick was being the “gold standard in messaging service,” though of course the company is probably better known for its enterprise constituents.
Even as the iPhone and Android began to rise and pushed Blackberry out of the spotlight, many still expected the RIM platform would manage to keep business customers in its back pocket. They were after all the bread and butter that made RIM the most used smartphone platform in the US.
Now, not only is that latter statistic no longer the case, but some of the biggest RIM customers – companies that paid for Blackberries for its thousands of employees – have cut off their contracts in favor of iPhones and Android phones.
This phenomenon seems to have taken RIM by surprise, as it has scrambled in recent months to come up with new products and services, only to come up mostly flat.
“Consumers now want phones that provide a broad selection of software and services. RIM has responded far too slowly,” said Wolf.
