RIM Co-CEO Jim Balsillie Talks Up "BlackBerry Lifestyle" at CTIA
RIM plans to dominate the smartphone market by creating a "BlackBerry lifestyle," says RIM Co-CEO Jim Balsillie, with new (or improved offerings) such as expanded e-mail and IM capabilities, wireless access to social network sites and more.
CIO — In a further sign that BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIM) sees the vast consumer market as key to its future success in the mobile space, Jim Balsillie,, RIM's co-CEO, touted the "BlackBerry lifestyle" in his keynote speech at the CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment event in San Francisco, barely addressing enterprise-specific products at all.
Balsillie was referring to the company's strategy to build on its current crop of "lifestyle" applications and services, like Web mail, personal calendars, instant messaging (IM) programs, mobile social networking apps and more, which are largely aimed at its consumer users--though many could potentially be used for business purposes as well.
The CTIA event is for both businesspeople and consumers, but Balsillie spent less than five minutes of his 35-minute speech on enterprise-related products and services. In fact, the only two enterprise-specific products Balsillie touched upon were RIM's BlackBerry Mobile Voice System (MVS), which can merge traditional corporate desk phones and cellular phones; and the company's Mobile Data System (MDS), which is designed to simplify the mobile application development and deployment process for organizations.
Balsillie's main focus was on the "convergence of the four screens," as he put it--the home phone; cell phone; home computer; and the television screen. In other words, consumers will increasingly ditch land-line phones altogether and rely on mobile phones for all of their communication needs. RIM will make that transition more compelling with more consumer-oriented phone designs and social networking, IM and e-mail options. RIM also plans to boost market share by bringing a desktop-like Internet environment and home television viewing experience to mobile devices, Balisillie said. That the market is ready for such a direction is evidenced by the growing popularity of smartphones in the consumer market and of consumers hunger for phones with more and more capabilities.
"This is all doable today, and it's just getting richer and richer and richer and more and more exciting," he said.
Balsillie spoke about the various types of "messaging payloads" or types of communication methods, available via BlackBerry, that will help make RIM handhelds and other smart devices more and more essential to businesspeople and increasingly to consumers.
"In the non-enterprise market, payloads are diverse," he said.
Mobile e-mail is RIM's real strength--users can add as many as 10 different e-mail accounts, both enterprise and consumer accounts--but Balsillie also noted that BlackBerry is the only mobile platform that supports all five of major IM services--AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo, ICQ and Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger. (RIM and AOL announced new support for AIM, ICQ and AOL Mail for BlackBerry at CTIA.) Additional payloads also include peer-to-peer messaging and cellular SMS.
