When visiting this year’s Symbian Smartphone Show, I wondered why RIM (the maker of the popular BlackBerry handhelds) still had a booth there after Nokia removed BlackBerry support from its latest handsets. The reason now hits us via Reuters:
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When focusing on partnering with Microsoft and IBM for corporate mobile email, Nokia last year dropped support for the Blackberry email service, but Furlong said Nokia users would in future be able to use the service again.“We are in the interim period of time when we have dropped support ourselves, and Blackberry is readying support for their service on Nokia devices,” he said.
I personally feel that this is due to licensing fees flowing from Nokia to RIM. By omitting the software from the ROM of a device, customers have to pay for their BlackBerry access solution – which increases Nokia’s operating margins. This allows the company to reduce its device prices…but comes at an unfortunate price!
Bundle deals always are a lot cheaper than individual sales. The author of this blog has negotiated out quite a few deals, and can attest that prices of 1$ per handheld are considered utopia by most ISVs selling their software to a manufacturer or carrier. Individual purchases, on the other hand, start at 10$ or more.
Nokia’s margins thus improve significantly, but cause a huge dent in customer’s wallets. The buck saved while buying the device quickly gets eaten up by the 10 bucks paid to RIM…which IMHO is a very dumb tradeoff for both Nokia and its customers. RIM benefits big-time, on the other hand. Their solution is dominant, which means that many customers will buy such an app…thereby generating huge profits…
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