1 Introduction
Research in Motion Ltd. (RIM) was founded in 1984, at the first, RIM provided IR LED display board for General Motors, but now, is a world leader in the mobile communications market and has office in North American, Europe and Asia Pacific. It is known primarily as the maker and provider of BlackBerry wireless devices and e-mail services. The major products of RIM are Blackberry devices, e-mail services, related software and services.The company is divided into two main strategic business units (SBUs): personal digital assistant (Blackberry smartphone and Playbook tablet) and software research and development (mobile e-mail processing system and apps).
The worldwide demand for smartphones is fueling a tense business market,Blackberry, HTC, Nokia, Iphone, Motorola, Microsoft, Samsung and Sony are the main players. ‘Underpinning smartphone growth is the rapidly shifting operating system landscape,’ added Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst with IDC's Mobile Phone Technology and Trends team. There are five main operation systems for smartphone market-Android, Blackberry OS, Symbian, IOS and Windows Phone (IDC, 2011). According the figure 1 which is a forecast for worldwide smartphone operating system 2011 and 2015 market share, it shows the fall of Symbian system clearly and Blackberry OS and IOS system will have a small decrease in the future several years, but Windows phone will have a dramatically increase.
Figure 1: Worldwide Smartphone Operating System 2011 and 2015 Market Share (source from: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS22871611)
Operating System
2011 Market Share
2015 Market Share
Android
38.9%
43.8%
BlackBerry OS
14.2%
13.4%
Symbian
20.6%
0.1%
iOS
18.2%
16.9%
Windows Phone 7/Windows Mobile
3.8%
20.3%
Others
4.3%
5.5%
Total
100.0%
100.0%
According to the figure 2,RIM’s market share had an obviously and sustained decrease in 2011 which is from 14.3 per cent