According to a new study from analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates, more the 30 percent of BlackBerry users at companies that employ more than 10,000 employees are planning to switch mobile platforms within the next twelve months. In the past, this segment of the business population has chosen the BlackBerry over other mobile platforms by 52 percent and the loss of this core segment will likely put a huge dent in BlackBerry sales. When asked if they were “completely satisfied” with their choice of mobile phone, only 16 percent of the business users in the survey were happy with the BlackBerry. Adversely, approximately 44 percent of iPhone owners choose the “completely satisfied” option.
This survey was conducted before last week’s extremely large BlackBerry service outage that affected BlackBerry owners in multiple countries. RIM’s market share of the mobile phone market has been gradually decreasing since the 2007 launch of the iPhone and appears to be accelerating with continual releases or more devices using the Android and iOS operating systems. Between the July 1 through September 30, mobile activations specific to smartphones were split by approximately 60 percent iOS devices and 40 percent Android devices. RIM recently started selling the BlackBerry 7 phones last month as well as the BlackBerry Bold.
After the major service outage, price comparison website Kelkoo conducted a study that found nearly 20 percent of all BlackBerry owners were planning on switching platforms very soon due to the service interruption. Another 42 percent were considering changing phones when their contract expired. According to a former employee of RIM, the service outage was caused by a faulty router which RIM identified as a “core switch failure”. The outage lasted three days and over 70 million BlackBerry users suffered from outage problems. RIM suffered a similar outage in 2005, but only lasted for approximately three hours based on an official report from RIM.
