Kushan Mitra
It was one of those statements that surprise you - reading that the boss of an Indian subsidiary that is doing fairly well suddenly quits. Even more surprising since the parent company is getting hammered in its key markets.
This is the statement in question -
"This is to confirm that Ms. Frenny Bawa - Research in Motion's (RIM) Managing Director for India - has left RIM in order to pursue other interests. We will keep you posted on Frenny's replacement. In the interim, Urpo Karjalainen, Senior Vice President - Greater China, India & ANZ will oversee the business operations for India. We appreciate Frenny's past contributions to RIM's growth and we wish her all the best."After spending far too long a time as a business journalist and not pursuing other interests, you get a general understanding of statements. I might be totally wrong here, but after reading this, it either appears that Bawa will join a bigger technology company or that she was asked to go. And I am leaning towards the latter.
That is surprising, since the
Canadian company RIM - the makers of
BlackBerry smartphone platform - was doing quite well in India. It had, thanks to some snappy advertising campaigns, attractively priced entry-level products (such as the Curve 8520) as well as marketing the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) as a free chat service had cracked the youth market. College kids, who were spending far too much on messaging and even with the now 'enhanced' 200 messages a day limit, spent far too much time texting, loved BBM.
But I never quite joined the BBM 'revolution', simply because I got hooked onto apps quite early and very honestly, the BlackBerry platform has far too few of them. In fact, I would go so far as to speculate that while RIM was cracking the youth market in India, it was losing the high-end market of people who understand phones. Sure, it has the Bollywood market, but given that most actors have average intelligence less than that of college students, and that they love gossiping, that really wasn't surprising.
LAUNCHES: BlackBerry
Curve 9360 |
Torch 9860 Their latest products had no attractiveness in them - the cameras were poor, a complete lack of fun applications and increasingly better devices from the likes of HTC and Samsung were weaning high-end customers away. A friend of mine, Michael is one of those people. He moved from a BlackBerry Bold to an iPhone 4 and thinks the email interface is far superior. Another friend Alexander has an office-issued BlackBerry but uses an iPhone as his personal 'fun' device.
Look at the Playbook. The device was launched by Salman Khan with a huge amount of fanfare in Mumbai, but anyone could have told you that despite its excellent hardware, it was doomed to fail. It did not work without a BlackBerry if you wanted to check corporate email, which almost everybody thought was a horrible idea, but for RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaradis. It was almost comical when BlackBerry executives pitched the 'BlackBerry Bridge' as a good thing.
The other silly thing was the lack of decent applications. Yes, BBM is nice, but a tablet to chat? And while the iPad has flaws, the PlayBook had many more flaws, and despite the '
Buy one, get a BlackBerry 8520 free' offer right now, it will not. And that is just a desperate stock-clearing move any which way - two 'not-so-great-and-soon-to-be-replaced' devices for the price of one.
This is why BlackBerry is being pummeled in developed markets where the 'low-end' category hardly exists. The RIM stock is trading at record-lows as it is bleeding market share. Of course, the outage did not help, with users such as me (currently using a Windows Phone Mango device) making fun of BlackBerry users.
That said, I am pretty convinced the reason BlackBerry services collapsed in India was when they capitulated and installed the 'snooping' tools for India's nosy security agencies. Whenever you insert a piece of hardware into a stack, things can and often do go badly wrong. And did Bawa quit because she failed in holding off India's Home Ministry? Could be.
Anyway, I would rather that the government does not snoop on me, but civil liberties is not something that either the government or Arvind Kejriwal and his ilk understand. But that is a debate for another time. But whatever I write here is just speculation. However, this much I do know; whoever takes over from Bawa will have a much tougher time than she did.
No matter what some mobile industry 'experts' say and call India a unique hardware market, in devices priced above Rs 10,000 it really is not. Global trends are just that, and I'm fairly certain BlackBerry device sales will fall off a cliff unless devices begin to excite users again.
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