Why is RIM Hiring iOS App Developers?
First, Research In Motion opened its highly secure Enterprise servers to Apple's iPhone. Then it unveiled BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, a enterprise device-management software for it. — And now, it appears the company plans to build apps for the iPhone as well.
Context & Ripple Effects
RIM has spent the past year dismantling its own walled garden piece by piece: after admitting in March 2011 that Android app support was mainly there to check the "lots of apps" box, it opened BlackBerry Enterprise Server to Apple's iPhone and unveiled BlackBerry Mobile Fusion as a cross-platform device-management product — both confirmed moves reported on March 22, 2012.
Today's report, picked up by Bloomberg, CNET, Engadget and The Verge among others, adds a third leg: job postings suggesting — unconfirmed, but consistent with the iOS-talent push AllThingsD tied to Mobile Fusion — that RIM will build native iPhone apps itself. Bloomberg's companion piece frames the stakes, noting BlackBerry has lost its top spot to Apple in its own Canadian corporate backyard.
First-order effects
- RIM's enterprise franchise stops being a BlackBerry-device moat: with BES open to iPhones and Mobile Fusion managing them, the same engineers who built RIM's apps now staff an effort — per the unconfirmed postings — to ship software for the platform eating its market.
- Apple gains an unlikely ally inside the corporate IT stack, as RIM's own secure-server infrastructure becomes an on-ramp for iPhone deployments in accounts BlackBerry once owned outright.
Second-order effects
- If RIM commits engineering resources to iPhone-side apps and management, its own PlayBook and BlackBerry handsets compete against platforms its parent actively supports — pricing and feature priorities inside RIM get pulled two directions at once.
- Bloomberg's finding that Apple has overtaken BlackBerry in corporate Canada puts pressure on other MDM vendors and carriers serving those accounts to offer iPhone-first management bundles, accelerating the displacement rather than slowing it.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to RIM repositioning from a handset maker into an enterprise mobility-management vendor whose revenue depends on rivals' devices succeeding — a structural identity change, though whether management software can replace hardware margins is genuinely unresolved.
- More broadly, the move treats mobile-OS dominance as a settled fact that enterprise vendors must accommodate rather than fight, a stance RIM resisted back when the talk was of new BlackBerry OS plans and acquisition rumors instead of building for Cupertino.
The trend: Enterprise mobility is shifting from device-centric control — where owning the handset meant owning the customer — to cross-platform management software, with RIM's own pivot one of the clearest markers of that reversal.