RIM’s mobile offerings are in a heap of trouble on the stock market, and its shareholders sought answers at its annual shareholder meeting held in an auditorium on the Wilfrid Laurier campus last week. RIM has long been criticized for not diversifying itself as the mobile market evolved. While they may have had market share since smartphone adoption really got started, that is no longer the case. BlackBerry simply doesn’t have the apps, social networking, or even web browsing capabilities that iPhones and Androids possess. If you don’t allow your users to easily access their content from the cloud on their mobile device, you can’t expect to keep your them happy.

While the RIM senior executives and board members tried to ease shareholders concerns, it was clear that the relationship was in trouble. Voters withheld 15 and 30 per cent of the votes for election of a board member, which suggests they don’t like the candidates they were offered. “[The board] has to look at the break-up for the company into the handset business and the software and services platform, and a potential sale of either or both or private placement funding investments by giant competitors like Microsoft, IBM, Facebook and others,” says Vic Alboini, chief executive for Jaguar Financial. “That will save this company. Their whole focus continues to be on licensing the BB10 platform, joint ventures and partnerships. And again, you can’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

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The past decade has been the undisputed generation of the mobile device. Research in Motion was a leader in the infant stages of smartphone technology when it released its first Blackberry with email capabilities in 2003. Since then, RIM has remained a leader in the mobile technology world, especially in the corporate world. In the past year, the company has taken a serious beating, with a 70 per cent slump in its stock. It dropped 19 per cent on June 29 after they posted a big quarterly loss and announced a delay in the launch of the BlackBerry 10 operating system. Needless to say, customers are running for the Silicon Valley hills occupied by iPhone and Android smartphones. Most analysts agree that the best route for the company to take is to sell off its assets, which could create disruptions in the BlackBerry service. Corporate companies who use BlackBerry heavily are now looking at contingency plans in the event that BlackBerry service gets disrupted.

“We are well on our way to having a dual environment, so if RIM did go out, we’d be ok,” says Robert Burkhart, director of new technology innovation at Nationwide Mutual Insurance. “If people are starting contingency plans now, they are behind the eight ball. They should have been looking at this all along.”

“RIM’s situation is dire, but even in a worst-case scenario, RIM’s servers aren’t likely to get turned off anytime soon,” says Avi Greengart, tech research director at Current Analysis. “Still, IT managers are looking more seriously at alternatives to BlackBerry. There’s a whole industry ready to provide security and management around Apple and Android.”

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