The Present and The Future (continued)

avc.com

12 points·cwan··3 comments

A P/E of 12 does not necessarily mean that investors think RIM will have steady profits. It seems more likely to me that's the balance point between the bulls and the bears.

The author pointed out the bear story for RIM. The bullish story for RIM is straightforward too: they're obviously working on a QNX-based rewrite of their OS. The blackberry platform has enough advantages, devoted followers and hasn't lost too much momentum, so they just need a solid offering with slight advantages and disadvantages compared to Android & iOS to do well. Considering how well they're doing even given how crappy BBOS is, if they can close that gap, they'll be fine. And basing it on QNX is a darn good start.

I imagine after the Kik incident any startup that had social mobile apps has probably already written RIM off as a platform worth developing for. If RIM's strategy is to "scare developers" into building apps for their platform then they have already lost.

As myspace has shown, when platforms stagnate they can easily fall apart and the decline can be fast and devastating

This gave me an image of a large mass of pack ice floating on polar seas -- it occupies a vast area, you don't want to mess with it, but when conditions turn, the whole thing can very quickly break apart and dissolve. (http://www.igsoc.org/annals/44/a44a057.pdf)

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