Businessweek Feature on RIM and the BlackBerry

Diane Brady and Hugo Miller, writing for Businessweek about RIM:

Balsillie thinks the world is wrong about apps. Many are just glorified bookmarks, he argues, that aren’t necessary if you can connect customers to the Web. “I’m not going to bring developers to the Web. I’m going to make mobility Web-friendly,” he says. “Why do you need a YouTube app if you play YouTube? Why do you need an app to follow the Tour de France if you can just follow the Tour de France?”

Balsillie has a point — or he would if the consumer universe operated logically.

No, he doesn’t have a point. The iPhone has a great browser — I say the best mobile browser, and certainly better than any BlackBerry’s. And people still prefer using native apps. The original 1.0 iPhone didn’t have an App Store. You know what people wanted? Native apps. This gets back to my talk at Web 2.0 Expo last month. Many native iOS apps are web clients — they’re just written using CocoaTouch instead of HTML/CSS/JavaScript. The results, in terms of user experience, speak for themselves.

And BlackBerry’s browser’s rendering engine? WebKit. From Apple. Do they think Flash is going to give them a competitive edge in mobile user experience?

And check this out:

There certainly appears to be a geographic divide in how RIM is viewed. More than 90 percent of Canadian analysts rate RIM a “buy,” while only half of their U.S. counterparts do.

★ Wednesday, 20 October 2010