Rim's Playbook - Will It Succeed?

On January 27th, 2010, Steve Jobs unveiled a product that few thought would start a revolution. The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco was abuzz with rumors about something that promised to be “magical” and “game-changing”. And there was Apple’s CEO, seated comfortably on a sofa gliding his fingers on a mystifying touch-based device, raising the curtain on what we all know today as the iPad. Believe it or not, the tablet-PC market was then, officially resurrected.

Fast forward to September 27th, eight months to be precise. Mike Lazaridis, CEO of Research in Motion (RIM), at the annual Developers Conference at San Francisco promised to take our BBM life to the next level by introducing the Playbook – “the first multiprocessing, multitasking, uncompromised browsing, enterprise ready professional-grade tablet”1. RIM with its PlayBook had now entered the nascent but booming tablet market along with Dell, Samsung and Apple (of course), and this will be the focus of my assignment.

The article “Will RIM’s Playbook Flip, Fly or Flop?”2 taken from E-CommerceTimes.com, one of the largest e-business and technology news publishers in the United States, talks about how RIM intends to focus not only on the enterprise users, but also on the consumers in the market and hence calling its tablet the ‘Play’book. The editor argues stating the 10,000 apps that RIM boasts in its App World is vastly inferior to the 250,000 apps in the iTunes App Store and about 100,000 apps in Google’s Android app store. However, since the PlayBook runs on a real-time operating system by QNX (RIM acquired QNX earlier in April 2010), critics indicate that RIM is emphasizing on the Web environment for development, which is optimistic. The article concludes with the clear fact that RIM is trying to capture the best of the Enterprise as well as the Consumer market with its Playbook by introducing features such as two front and back cameras, stereo sound and classy media player, that would...