Posted by Greg Mills
The RIM PlayBook is being sold off at $99 as paperweights. Best Buy sold their existing PlayBook inventory that they had tried to return to RIM, unsuccessfully it seems. When they sold out at $99, it appears Best Buy has washed its hands of the worst dud since the Kin Phone Microsoft pulled from the market after about 6 weeks of humiliation and abuse in the press.
RIM has taken the “gang that can’t shoot straight” title away from Microsoft as every BlackBerry and the PlayBook have failed to gain market share for the once big gun in the enterprise arena. The outages that mysteriously took down the RIM network and repeated dud smartphone models have really hurt the reputation of RIM. With a bill of materials for PlayBook of about $205, retailing them for $99 amounts to dumping them to clear shelf space.
It is hard to imagine PlayBook coming back at this stage of the game. The promised software that RIM failed to launch and the lackluster feature set doomed the PlayBook from the start. The marketing man in charge of launching PlayBook resigned before the launch to avoid the embarrassment that he knew was sure to follow. How would you like to have on your resume that you were in charge of launching PlayBook?
As rumors of a retinal display for iPad 3 with an upgraded 4 core Apple processor are in the news, the cheap Amazon tablets and perhaps the Samsung tablets are really the only competition Apple faces. Nowhere is it written that Apple has to be the only show in town to prosper. That seems to be the case as the head start Apple has on tablets seems to be holding better than even Apple had hope, I bet.
Every major company that fails does so for reasons that Apple needs to watch out for. Complacency and a failure to innovate are sure to doom tech companies at an incredible pace. Five years ago RIM was on top of the enterprise smartphone market and no one thought they were likely to loose that position. Recently Apple replaced RIM as top dog in the enterprise market. Apple has made a lot of the right moves to get iPhone, Mac and iPad respected by the gate keepers of tech in the business world.
As we anticipate an HD screen on iPad, opportunities abound for business apps that will run on the upcoming iPad 3. Medical apps are likely to soar as reading medical imaging and using Siri to make notes is sure to take off. My wife is a nurse and spends the final hour of the day typing up her “nurses notes” that document the care she gave during the day. Nursing homes and hospitals will need up to date iPad software to reduce their lost productivity due to legal requirement to document everything.
I am also interested in how the Google symmetrical 1 Gig internet coming to Kansas City is going to impact the iOS platform.
It is a great time to be an iOS developer. That is Greg’s Bite GregMills@Mac.com