The Real Reason There Was No Email On The BlackBerry PlayBook
When Research In Motion shipped the PlayBook without native email support, it was surprising. — After all, RIM's greatest strength is a killer email-application for BlackBerrys. Why didn't it have email baked into the PlayBook?
Context & Ripple Effects
RIM entered 2011 arguing the PlayBook is great even without a BlackBerry, then spent February and March papering over its thinnest flank — announcing an Android app player that its own CEO essentially framed as checking the 'lots of apps' box ([[a:1190673]]) rather than a real developer ecosystem. Against that backdrop, shipping a tablet with no native email was more than a spec-sheet oddity: email is the franchise that made BlackBerry the corporate standard.
First-order effects
- Buyers evaluating the PlayBook against Apple's iPad — the rival Reuters framed RIM's tablet as built to fight — confront a product from the email company that cannot do email on its own, directly undercutting the January 'great even without a BlackBerry' pitch.
- Enterprise IT departments, the constituency that made BlackBerry's mail client the killer app, have one more reason to defer PlayBook purchases until RIM ships the missing functionality.
Second-order effects
- The Android app player RIM announced as an apps-gap filler now carries extra weight as the only plausible stopgap for everyday tasks like email, making RIM more dependent on a compatibility layer it pitched as a checkbox item.
- Every review and buyer comparison through mid-2011 forces RIM into defensive messaging about a promised fix, diverting attention from the car-software push and other diversification efforts at exactly the moment founders need wins.
Third-order effects
- If RIM's defining strength cannot be carried intact onto its own next-generation platform, the company's identity as the secure-email vendor weakens structurally, feeding the leadership-change speculation already swirling around the founders.
- The episode illustrates a pattern for incumbent platform owners: rebuilding the OS for a new device category risks orphaning the very features that justified the brand's premium, a trap any enterprise-software franchise faces when porting to consumer hardware.
The trend: Incumbent mobile vendors are discovering that their flagship software strengths do not automatically transfer when they rebuild their platforms for the post-PC device market, a dynamic sharpening RIM's slide in 2011.