RIM = DOA?

I've written about iPhone economics before, and it remains a really interesting market.   One of the great stories is that of RIM, the maker of the Blackberry.  Here's a firm that had a commanding market share not too many years ago, but has been completely hammered by the rise of the iPhone and Android smartphone platforms.

RIM is trying to catch up, so have a look at this recent article in The New York Times about release of the Blackberry 10 prototype.

The good news is that RIM understands the importance of getting a large group of software developers to work on applications that run on their OS.  The bad news is that developers will make their decisions based largely on whether they believe the product will be a hit with consumers.  RIM wants developers to make significant investments, but these investments will pay off only if the product sells well.  It's a tough sell for RIM, and I thought it was interesting to listen to the voice of skeptical developers such as Phill Ryu at Impending.

Even the pro-Blackberry-10 people quoted in the article didn't say much that would convince me the firm has settled on a good strategy.  The CEO of Refresh Mobile says the platform integrates well with social media...  but is "connect with Facebook" really much of a differentiator at this point?  And a Gartner analyst cites the phone's ability to capture extra frames when shooting photos.  I agree that this sounds like a nice idea, and is very much something I'd like to have on my phone.   But good ideas are different from good strategy, and it's hard to imagine that "extra frames when you snap" is something that iOS or Android couldn't replicate in a day or two of development-team time.