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The Year in Review: Research in Motion

A series of missteps by RIM were only made worse by a string of unlucky events in a year that the BlackBerry maker will be happy to see in the rear-view mirror.

December 28, 2011

Research in Motion entered 2011 with high hopes for its , the upcoming debut of its first tablet device, the , and plans for a of its flagship BlackBerry smartphones. A year later, RIM is scrambling to assure investors that it will turn things around in 2012 as its flight for the exits turns into a stampede.

So what went so very, very wrong?

The Plummeting PlayBook
RIM released its first tablet to great fanfare in April, but the coming-out party when it became evident that the PlayBook lacked native email and other key features that BlackBerry users had come to love and depend upon for years.

The company promised an update to the PlayBook operating system that would incorporate such missing ingredients, but even that proved disappointing—RIM until 2012.

Sales of the 7-inch tablet have been dismal, despite a series of initiated later in the year. And while PlayBook revenue wouldn't have been a huge part of RIM's financial picture in its first year even if the device had been a hit, the company's missteps with its first tablet symbolized how it has been losing the battle for consumers' imagination to the likes of Apple, Google, Samsung, and HTC.

The Consumerization of IT
The Canadian smartphone maker has faced another challenge in recent quarters—the of consumer-oriented smartphones like Apple's iPhone in enterprise IT environments that have been RIM's bread-and-butter for years.

Traditionally, businesses and government agencies have had strict guidelines for the types of computers, devices, operating systems, and applications that employees can use for work. But at many organizations, it's now the employees who are dictating the terms of their technology interfaces to IT departments.

As a result, Research in Motion's BlackBerry smartphone, once the be-all-and-end-all of the enterprise, is increasingly being challenged by Apple's iPhone and Android-based phones as people incorporate their favored consumer devices into their work lives.

"No matter what IT restrictions are in place, users are bringing the iPhone and the iPad into the office, and they're expecting them to work," Michael Oh, president and founder of Apple reseller and system integrator Tech Superpowers, told PCMag.com earlier this year.

"It's a trend that's slowly been growing over the last five years or so. Users are more empowered these days. Part of it is generational," he continued. "They are asking for this tech they're used to having since the time they were in school."

RIM may still be top dog in the enterprise, but the lines being drawn in the sand are clear. If the company wants to hold on to that spot, it will need to put as much effort into winnng over consumers as it does IT guys. That means making up ground in the app gap with Apple and Google, and producing phones and devices that excite regular folks—something RIM has not shown a great deal of skill at doing in recent years.

Continue Reading: A Series of Unfortunate Events>

A Series of Unfortunate Events
To make matters worse for RIM in 2011, it seemed that every stroke of luck the company had during the year ranged from bad to worse.

The company's ballyhooed blending of the QNX operating system that runs the PlayBook and the BlackBerry OS that runs its smartphones when software developer BASIS International blocked RIM from using its preferred name, BBX, for the new OS.

Instead, the upcoming platform will be called BlackBerry 10—not a terrible name, but still a painful reminder that RIM's for the wonders of the OS-formerly-known-as-BBX in the latter half of 2011 wasn't particularly well thought out by the legal department.

In mid-December, however, the company said it would of BlackBerry 10 until late next year because RIM is waiting for an LTE chipset from a third-party vendor. A report from Boy Genius Report then quoted anonymous officials who accused RIM of "lying" about the reason for the delay; the sources said the real reason was because BlackBerry 10 wasn't anywhere near ready for prime time. RIM .

RIM was also hit by a in October that left millions of BlackBerry users around the world without service for hours, and in some cases, days. The company had to offer its customers to make up for the service failure and over the outage.

And poor RIM also couldn't even manage to have the best fire sale for a struggling first-gen tablet in 2011. Those honors went to Hewlett-Packard, which actually managed to in consumer tablet sales for the year behind Apple, thanks to steep discounts on its webOS-based TouchPad.

Finally, as an exclamation point on RIM's star-crossed year, the company reported in late December that thieves carrying some 5,200 PlayBooks with a retail value in the millions of dollars.

Outlook
It's tempting to say that 2012 is a make-or-break year for RIM. But if the company is broken up or put on the auction block next year, as some of its most influential investors are pressuring management to do, we'll probably look back on 2011 as RIM's make-or-break year—and the one in which the one-time high-tech wunderkind finally broke.

On the other hand, if RIM remains intact, it'll be because a lot has gone right in the first few months of 2012. It'll mean an improved version of the PlayBook is as as RIM is promising. It'll mean that the business-friendly functions and particularly the security locks that RIM bakes into its BlackBerrys have taken on renewed importance for IT departments facing new and dynamic threats to mobile devices and software.

Finally, it will mean that RIM's brain trust has figured out a way to thrive amongst the brutal competition served up not just by Apple, Google, and other established mobile players, but potentially by Microsoft, which is set to unleash Windows 8 in 2012, and even by a potentially rejuvenated webOS, which HP has .

For more, see PCMag's year in review for , , and .