I'm not one for making drastic predictions about the fate of different companies. All I can do is look at what's happening across a market and make some sort of educated guess as to what I think is coming. My Spider-sense is telling me that RIM's messaging dominance is coming to an end.

North American BlackBerry users suffered an outage yesterday. I've worked in the IT biz for a while and know that sometimes, despite all the care, attention and redundancy built into a system, a failure is possible. However, I also know that repeated outages are a bad sign. RIM has suffered several outages over recent months and while their overall uptime numbers look good, the utility nature of the service means that the amount of downtime isn't a good measure of reliability. The impact of outages is the true measure.

Secondly, Apple's deal with Microsoft to support corporate push-email using the ActiveSync protocol is very bad news for RIM. We already know that Safari on the iPhone is the most popular mobile browser on the market. In other words, people like carrying and using their iPhones as communications devices. It's specualted that Microsoft will garner 70% of the commercial email market by 2010 (see this story). In other words, much of the corporate email market will be asking why they should pay a third party to supply a service they can do themselves.

Some time ago, RIM started licensing their BlackBerry Connect software to mobile phone makers like Palm and Nokia. It never caught on. I don't think that's a good sign.

My final thought on this (for now at least) is that India, with its billion person population, is shunning the BlackBerry as the data can't be interrogated by authorities. The breach of privacy angle on this is a worrying, but it's a concern that many countries have raised in the past. Even when you run your own BlackBerry Enterprise Server the emails, web browsing activity and other network traffic is funnelled through RIM's own servers. I think that scares the daylights out of many companies.

In my view, RIM is at a crossroads. Their market cachet is fading, users are disgruntled over reliability issues and ActiveSync, buoyed by the iPhone, is now increasingly being seen as a viable, perhaps even preferable, alternative. RIM might survive - I hope they do as competition is badly needed in order to force companies to innovate and to stimulate start-ups. However, things don't look good at the moment.

 BlackBerry • BlackBerry Outages • RIM • RIM Failure