We recently predicted that RIM wouldn’t make it to the end of 2012, and frankly, since then, they haven’t done much to argue otherwise. Things are so bad at the house that Crackberry built that their executives get tanked and ground planes for entire days with their behavior.
Still, that’s not nearly as bad as, well, the PlayBook. How would you describe a tablet that starts out selling 500,000 on release, then 250,000 the next quarter, and only 150,000 the quarter after that? If you said “a device that needs someone to put it out of its misery,” you’re not RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis, who affirmed his support for the nonstarter that he had to offer a $300 price cut on before anybody would buy one on the same conference call that he admitted that his company wasn’t going to meet its financial targets and eat a $485 million loss.
Anybody with half a brain has noticed that the “tablets” that are selling the most and that people seem to want are…actually e-readers, what with the surprisingly competitive Nook and Kindle Fire — which also happen to be a sub-$300 price. Maybe RIM should put out an e-reader based on Android.