RIM: improving the visibility of BlackBerry 7

Research in Motion’s reorganisation will see no sell off or separation of their activities, with the company deciding to strongly push BlackBerry 7 in the United States via an advertising campaign.

By taking the reins of Research in Motion (RIM) Thorsten Heins quickly indicated that he would maintain the company’s general direction set by outgoing co-CEO’s Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, eliminating any possibilities of a sale of the company’s hardware or software divisions.

One of the strategies being adopted to correct the company’s issues is to launch a large marketing campaign to attract users to BlackBerry products. RIM is looking to stand out from their competition thanks to their end to end system, their handsets and data security, which is why these are all under the company’s control so as to assure operability. If these elements were separated out into different affiliates, service may be degraded with an unmanageable price war possibly breaking out.

They are hoping to follow Apple’s model, with their argument being similar to those put forward by Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, who has used the same reasoning to explain their choice of Windows Phone rather than Android in early 2011, which will provide the system with a fighting chance of becoming a third option in addition to iOS and Android.


Pushing the value of BlackBerry 7 in the USA
While awaiting the release of BlackBerry 10 in the second quarter of 2012, Thorsten Heins has stated that he is shocked to see that 80 to 90% of BlackBerry users in the United States are still running BlackBerry 5 or BlackBerry 6 and have not moved on to the latest release - BlackBerry 7 for mobile Web browsing, one of the biggest frustrations encountered by users.

The mobile browser has for a long time been a weak link in Blackberry and RIM’s platform which has seen an improved user interface in the latest release. One of the first actions of the groups new CEO is to therefore widely promote BlackBerry 7 in the United States in the coming weeks to provide it with improved visibility.

It has to be said that the launch of BlackBerry 7 last August was done without a lot of fanfare, which means that the general public is largely not even aware of its existence. While the company has the right intentions - even though this version may only be around for a few more months, it may be seen as hiding the platforms criticisms including operability and cost while awaiting the release of BlackBerry 10 which has been too long in development – especially considering the financial mire that RIM finds themselves stuck in.