Caught with their pants down

Another day and another mobility giant disappoints.

This time around its RIM, makers of the Blackberry. The once darling of the markets and the must-have device of any workaholic executive, the Blackberry led the way for corporations to serve their emails on mobile technology. It had so many things that were wrong to start with - the clunky wheel mouse, inability to read attachments, constant scrolling up and down to find messages, that blinking deductive text that made so many messages just total rubbish. It didn't matter, the Blackberry was simply a cutting edge device, we put up with it all.

Suddenly the world is different. Profits dropped in the quarter to May to $695m down from $769m on the same period last year - missing even their revised forecast. Talk of challenges and cost cutting is rife - shares are down 12%. Oh and any company that has joint CEOs is asking for trouble.

The same could be said for Nokia who, having absorbed Symbian, had got so locked into their own world of mobile phones they simply failed to see the Smartphone revolution as a threat. HTC, Apple, Samsung have all battered them repeatedly and now they have turned to Microsoft as a last ditch effort to be saved.

For Blackberry, their woes have gotten worse as there have been delays in delivering their new tablet product which would be just another catch up device in a rapidly filling market. Google Android came from left field with Apple to invade the mobility market and their power and brilliance has simply left the traditionalists behind. Innovation at RIM and Nokia seems to be a thing of the past.

In both cases, RIM and Nokia have been caught with the pants down. RIM has at least got a decent share of the corporate market to defend but when it took me precisely two minutes to configure my email client on my Android with ZERO new software on any server, you know that Blackberry are struggling for the future.

Analysts are saying that users are not waiting for Blackberry - they are moving to other platforms. The same can be said of Nokia. Too little, too late.