BlackBerry Touting Download Numbers That Aren’t Quite True

July 13th, 2011, In Mobile Media, by Beverly Crandon

You’ve got to hand it to BlackBerry.  They’re still producing press releases and blog posts that tout the positives of their business – and they should.  The negative press they are getting needs to be mitigated by a source and what better a source than themselves.  However, the most recent release to support their product health claims, caused me to raise an eyebrow.  Yesterday, on the RIM blog, they announced that they reached the 1 billion download mark, in their BlackBerry App World store.  This caused us to raise an eyebrow, not because it took them two years to get there and Apple only 1 year (Apple is  now at 1 billion downloads per month), but because we learned that the download number they were advertising include application updates – now that’s a bit misleading.  What’s stopping them from posting the download numbers, exempt of the application updates? This leaves me a bit suspicious and yelling corporate propaganda.  Nonetheless, my position is and has always been that RIM is not fighting a losing battle, if they focus on the things they do well, and stop trying to be a me too product (the iPhone killer, etc…).

If RIM left their BlackBerry division focus on providing tools for the business user, both independently and from an enterprise approach, they could maintain that level of the marketplace.  Their dabbling in entertainment add-on’s is causing for a fragmented corporate mentality and as a result, their bounce-back strategies seem scattered.  Their need to release numbers to show breadth that are not true, is really showing their lack of depth.

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