The Survival Guide for Life After RIM

IT pros preach gadget diversity in case of a BlackBerry apocalypse

“I’m not happy with the situation at RIM, either. Who can be happy with where we are?” — CEO Thorsten Heins in an interview with CIO.comPhotograph by Peter Foley/Bloomberg

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By Scott Moritz and Olga Kharif

July 13, 2012 at 2:20 AM UTC

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This article is part of the July 16, 2012 issue of businessweek.

In September, Nathan Gaude, the mobile-device manager at accounting firm Decosimo in Chattanooga, told his co-workers to ditch their BlackBerrys. The number of devices there shrank from 40 to three. “We watched RIM really going downhill,” Gaude says. “They may not be around in a year to support their devices.”

Research In Motion has spent years struggling to keep up with Apple’s iPhone and devices based on Google’s Android operating system. Its share of the global smartphone market fell by more than half, to 6.4 percent, from the first quarter of 2011 to the first quarter of 2012, according to research firm IDC. After RIM Chief Executive Officer Thorsten Heins announced yet another round of bad news in June—the company will cut 5,000 jobs, post a bigger-than-expected quarterly loss, and delay shipment of important new software—many longtime BlackBerry corporate customers accelerated their migration to other devices or started working on contingency plans.