Superman or Spiderman…Apple or Blackberry?

  • Posted by
  • on May 13th, 2008

Before you chime in with…What about Google and Android, shut your holes. Chill for a moment and just ponder:

Could Mike Tyson beat Drago (Rocky 4)?

We all grew up with the if so and so fought so and soDaring Fireball’s John Gruber writes is this most excellent post .

John says the ‘Crackheads’ at RIMM are screwed:

To understand why Apple is making a concerted effort to appeal to BlackBerry users, consider an analogy to the board game Risk. RIM has a large army (read: users), but they’re all massed together in one spot on the map. They care about email, they care about exactly the sort of enterprise features Apple has announced for the iPhone, and they are known to be willing to pay several hundred dollars for a handset. A lucrative target that can be attacked all at once. And the BlackBerry is weakest where the iPhone is strongest: web browsing, music, and video.

Compare and contrast with, say, a software platform like Windows Mobile, or a hardware maker like Nokia — their users are spread across a wide variety of phones and platforms. It was far easier to turn the iPhone into something almost every BlackBerry customer might at least consider than it would have been to make a lineup of iPhones that appeal to every Nokia customer.

RIM doesn’t really have any lock-in other than user habits. The BlackBerry gimmick is that it works with the email system your company bought from Microsoft. Replace a BlackBerry with an iPhone (2.0) and the messages, contacts, and calendar events that sync over the network will be the same as the ones on the BlackBerry you just tossed into a desk drawer.

In broad terms, BlackBerrys are optimized first for email; the iPhone for the web. What’s more important, an email client or a web browser? For most people, and perhaps even most current BlackBerry users, the answer is clearly the web.

John – You had my attention at ‘RISK’. The great post won’t make you money tomorrow or even next week, but over time, bazillions are at stake.

So who really will be the long term winner?

Place your bets…and yes…Google wins either way :) .

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