First out of the gate, and now in the back of the pack.

There are two interesting developments this week on the evolution of the strategies of companies that I have been tracking.

The first, is the new favorite to bash (I have been critical since early last year) Research in Motion (RIM), the company that brought us the previously game changing Blackberry line of devices.

The second, is that Sprint has essentially abandoned WiMAX and is now committing  to LTE.  I will expand on this in a future post.

For RIM, a summary:

• The barely made their most pessimistic sales targets (with sales down over 21% year over year)
• Resignation of former co-chief executive Jim Balsillie (is this then a co-resignation?, who is going to staff the innovation committee?)
• Stepping down of the chief technology officer David Yacht (I though the co-CEOs were the brain trust
• Dan Dodge, former head of QNX Software is the new CTO (hmmm, do we really think that an operating system is going to restore luster in a crowed OS market?)

Remember, when the current CEO stepped into place, he made the impression that the previous leadership was really doing the right things, and that it was a function of marketing that was causing the loss of sales and market share (this message sent the stock tumbling).

Well, the newish CEO, Thorsten Heins, says now that the company would now focus corporate blackberry environments, their previous area of dominance and where they were first out of the gate.  This was initially taken as a sign that the company was going to abandon the consumer market, but I doubt that was the intent (although it ultimately may be the reality).

Can RIM salvage their once corporate dominance in securely managing mobile devices to move from their now nearly back of the pack position?

If RIM is going to focus on the corporate marketplace it is probably too late – unless they can rapidly turn their Blackberry Enterprise Server system to real management of non-RIM devices.  The trend to “bring your own device” (see, IBM) is strong and therefore the corporate marketplace may be dominated by consumer-based decision making.  In addition, there are established and startup companies that are specializing in enabling IT departments to manage this consumer purchased, but integrated into the corporate environment devices (see, Wikipedia, notice that RIM is not even on the list!).