March 6 was they day the doctor informed RIM that they were terminal. There will surely be some heroic efforts to resurrect the patient, and extraordinary measures will be used to prolong its life. Legions of Crackberryheads will be in denial, but they will eventually come to the stage of acceptance and face the inevitable.
I am not yet an owner of the iPhone nor do I currently use any smartphone, so it’s safe to assume I don’t know what I am talking about. That said, with Apple’s announcement yesterday that they will be making the iPhone fully Enterprise ready, there is no hope that RIM will be able to compete in the long run. The iPhone as of the last quarter had a 28% share of the smartphone market. This is after the iPhone had been for sale for 6 months. Six months! And remember that the iPhone achieved this market share with virtually no support for all those enterprisey things (like push email, push contacts, push calendar, etc.) that corporate IT people demand. That tells you that people are desperate for a well thought-out device that just does things beautifully.
Now that Apple is going to provide all the functionality to support Exchange and more, it will be hard even for the the usually change-resistant IT guys to fight off the overwhelming demand that is sure to come from their users. Apple is enrolling beta testers as we speak, and if they ship the 2.0 update of the iPhone software at the end June (or even earlier at the WWDC maybe?), it will certainly be interesting to see how quickly it will be picked up by companies around the country. If they also release the rumored 3G version of the iPhone, then watch the sales chart soar. I suspect that I’ll be doing my part to help.