Find: Dear RIM, I'm your customer and I don't wear a suit

I think that RIM will have to kiss anyone beside their business customers goodbye. If they are smart, they will make BBM a cross platform app so that some non business folks will still be around when they have stabilized their corporate business. Keeping their corporate business these days means treating suits more and more like consumers, so they should be well on their way to consumer appeal by then.


Like Joanna shamelessly admitted in her editorial a few months back, I was a BlackBerry addict. I'm also a 20-year old college student / tech-head whose phone serves every purpose from communications device to music player to TV remote. I tried to switch cold turkey and bought an iPhone 4 in August, but somewhere around Thanksgiving I gave in and picked up a Verizon Bold. I've been double fisting ever since -- using the BB almost exclusively for BBM, and my iPhone for everything else.
Fast forward to late last week when I attended a meeting in New York with Tim Stevens and RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis to get the latest dish on the PlayBook. As Lazaridis demoed myriad features from HDMI presentation mode to the built-in music player on the company's hotly debated tablet, it hit me: the one question I've been pondering since getting a real look at the device. Who is it for? At that moment, I realized the problem that's been plaguing RIM as of late -- and not just in its tablet strategy, but its phone strategy as a whole: it doesn't know who its products are for and subsequently can't deliver. Am I crazy? Read on after the break and hear me out.
Continue reading Editorial: Dear RIM, I'm your customer and I don't wear a suit
Editorial: Dear RIM, I'm your customer and I don't wear a suit originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 15:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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