Check out my reply to a discussion on @gdgt if #RIM should abandon #BlackBerry 10 and adopt Android or Windows Phone http://t.co/z9rLN1o3

Your local “Canadian living in the US” here, I’ll start off by saying anyone who knows me knows I’m an Android fanboy, but I can’t help but support the hometown hero, I’m also one to often cheer for the underdog (eg. webOS).

BlackBerry Outside the US

I think the situation for RIM is a little different outside the US, or even more so, outside the Tech scene a lot of us are a part of. The BlackBerry is traditionally a business phone. “BlackBerry Internet Service is available in 91 countries worldwide on over 500 mobile service operators”. When I was back in Canada I would often hear business people “oh, send me your PIN” (Personal Identification Number for BBM). Or “Yeah, I’ll ping you later” - something tells me it’s both a play on PIN and the networking name. It's in some ways part of a business culture.

See davidribeiro94’s comment “RIM is still going very strong here in Canada, UK, and a bunch of countries in Asia. Every single week there's someone on Facebook posting his/her BB PIN”.

Back in Canada, 4 of my family members have BlackBerry’s. Honestly, I’m looking forward to RIM launching their BBM app on Android, to keep in touch since my family's always BBMing each other (it’s free, like iMessage on iPhone).

Governments and Corporations

Government and a lot of corporations equip their employees with BlackBerry’s as “work phones”. RIM has nailed that market, and I bet is a significant part of their revenue stream and probably why they aren’t going anywhere. Out of anyone Windows phones might be able to take them on in this area. Those gov/corps don’t want to move away from blackberry because they know it’s secure, it would be costly to change, and mean training their tech’s on new hardware / software to support.

Profitability?

If you look at Wikipedia they seem to make 5 billion more sales than their previous year, year over year. As well as increasing net income at 25% - 50% year over year. Source: wikipedia.org

That doesn’t seem like an indicator of a company that’s going away anytime soon. Despite this though, their stock hit an almost all time low of $12/share Dec 20th, 2011. The stock has since been on a general rise over the last month, likely due partially to their announcement of Playbook OS 2.0.

Positioning Themselves - Their Future

I think the general consensus of this thread is RIM has to refocus. Which I think even they realize (In July 2011, they cut 2,000 jobs). I’m not sure if being just another skin of Android is the solution though. They know they've got the business users covered, their challenge is to make phones cool enough to get the general consumer to choose them. They have the best keyboard phones on the market, solid Exchange and messaging, and It’s not like they’re not trying new cool things - PlayBook OS 2.0 looks pretty good, they borrow a lot of concepts from webOS (Card View, Synergy, etc) and ICS: http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/10/blackberry-playbook-os-2-hands-on .