Research in Motions Savior: Android Blackberry!

I was reading this article on how RIM is pretty much stuck in 1997 when it was a huge deal.

Of course, RIM’s shortcomings were old news by that point. From June 2008 to June 2011, RIM Shareholders lost almost $70 billion, or 82 percent, as the company’s market capitalization dropped from $83 billion to $13.6 billion. The decline forced the company in July 2011 to cut 2,000 jobs, the biggest lay-off in its history, reducing the workforce by around 11 percent.

That is pretty sobering and there might be more pain to come. However an idea that I just thought about is Blackberry needs to abandon its OS altogether and bet the house on a Blackberry that works with the Android OS.

When I got my first Blackberry I mostly got it because it had a full keyboard and not some digital keyboard which are normally hard for me to type on. I then bought a Samsung smartphone that had a full keyboard that you can access by pushing up the screen part. The main reason I went from Blackberry to Samsung is that Blackberry Apps suck and their web browser was a joke. I will probably never buy another Blackberry that runs on a Blackberry OS. However I would probably buy a Blackberry that ran on Android and perhaps there are others out there like me.

So RIMs plan should be in two parts. First their email software can be sold as an Android app for use on non-Blackberry phones. Secondly on Blackberry phones they can have very close integration for email but have access to the Android Play store. So a Blackberry can still be used for work because you will have your corporate email and your micro-strategy app that runs on Android at the same time. This company would not have to worry about either developing their own piece of software just so people can keep their Blackberries.

What they save on programmers and development for a hypothetical Blackberry 11 phone O/S they can instead to make the Android Blackberry stand out from the Samsung and LG phones on the market. I can see corporate customers who have Blackberry servers in place wanting an updated email service that runs either on their IPhones or Android Phones or on a Blackberry dedicated phone. If that isn't currently possible in the code then they need to rewrite it instead of forging on with Blackberry 11.

In other words concentrate all of their programmers and developers toward making the Blackberry email app the best and most secure email app in the App Store/Android Play Store so that it becomes ubiquitous. Then the phone OS will be Googles problem and not RIMs. In this situation licensing costs will go up but other costs and user flight will go down. I think an Android Blackberry might be RIMs last gasp before they need to sell themselves off to Microsoft or something.