Is it any wonder that RIM will be suffering from the effects of competition? Since the launch of the iPhone, Palm Pre, and Droid (and all of its Android cousins), the Blackberry has seen its market share drop. Accoridng to reserach firm, ChangeWave, customer satisfaction for the Blackberry has dropped by five percentage points (down to 43%) between June 2009 and September 2009.

The Apple iPhone, thanks to a combination of enterprise offerings like email and mobile multimedia, has made inroads into RIM’s principal customer base. Many RIM supporters will say that iPhone’s traction in the business community is very very tiny, and they would be correct. However, what is key to understand is that RIM has lost customers to not one but multiple handset vendors.

RIM’s Blackberry has not changed much over the past 3 years; which happens to be a dozen lifetimes in the handset business. The Blackberry has been positioned as a business device since its inception; nothing wrong with that. The Blackberry had once been considered to be the first real business wireless handset. Today, every wireless handset is capable of doing the same thing; email access. Further, the new handsets from competitors surf the web far better than the Blackberry. RIM cannot use intellectual property as a gating factor. RIM does not even own the core wireless email patent; the patent is owned by NTP. Therefore intellectual property cannot be used by RIM as a defensive business measure.

So what can and should Blackberry do? The answer is that it must pursue an aggressive mobile media strategy. Right now the marketplace, both retail consumer and enterprise, are moving down two paths. The first path is the smart handset that can do nearly everything. The second path is the dumb handset; supported by what is now commonly called a cloud computing environment. Frankly, RIM needs to pursue a path. I prefer a handset that does everything. I am still trying to get used to relying on a network for application support.

Hence, since I am not the market that RIM wants to sell to; I am not a first adopter but a cautious consumer, my suggestion to RIM is: Go down the path of cloud computing. Corporations prefer to control what is on the handset they are supplying and paying for. Employees need to remember that when their employer pays their cell phone bill, then their telephone number and handset really belong to the company. Corporations are very leery of employees using corporate property for personal uses – think porn site surfing, and goodness knows what else some employees have been caught doing on company time and property.

Does this mean we are looking at a “big brother” type of scenario? Yes, probably, but let us think about it. Would you want to have someone working for you or with you that is surfing the web doing nasty things while sitting next to you in an office? Cloud computing was not meant to give a corporation control over a handset but it does provide an environment to facilitate corporate device control.

RIM is now facing stiff competition from an emerging group of handset manufacturers. Unless RIM takes some type of action it is going to become a distant memory.