Apple and RIM merger
Sunday, January 27th, 2008I was listening to the CEO of Sony talking in Davos last week, and he seemed to indicate that Sony’s strategy to compete with the iPOD was focused on cell phones with Walkman functionality incorporated. It looks like Sony is counting on cells phones to eventually replace iPODs for music. Of course Apple seems to have already realized this, which might be the main reason why they are releasing the iPhone which is focused on the consumer segment of the cell phone market..
The iPhone is definitely a nice consumer product, but Apple has not been focused on penetrating the large corporate market with the iPhone. The corporate or enterprise market is of course the place where Research in Motion is very strong. There has been much written about various cell phone replacing RIM over the years, but they still have an extremely loyal following with business users.
It would be great if Apple and RIM merged together to focus on the cell phone market. Both companies seem to have great industrial design groups, and very loyal followings with their customers. Unlike Nokia, Motorola, or Sony, they do not have a very wide of cell phone products to cover all of the cell phone market. If they were to combine their strengths at this point in time, I am sure that they would be able to fend off their larger competitors and grow their market share in the cell phone market.
I doubt that a merger will ever happen, but if it did it would be interesting to see what products these two companies would come out with.