Has Steve Ballmer got a taste for BlackBerries?

By Stuart Corner
Sunday, 02 September 2007 13:55

Opinion and Analysis

The rumour mill has been running hot that Microsoft might make a takeover bid for Canada's Research in Motion, developer of the famed BlackBerry handheld.

One report quoted un-named financial analysts saying that the rumours were not without foundation and reflected Microsoft's concern that rival Google was about to move into the mobile operating system sector to compete with Windows Mobile.

Some commentators suggest that the move is in response to the stellar success of Apple's iPhone and the growing speculation that Google is about to launch a mobile phone.

Although Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system is deployed in smartphones it is very much a small player in a market in which Symbian (almost 50 percent owned by Nokia) commands more than 70 percent market share and where a recent survey of application developer s found Nokia's S60 application platform, which runs on Symbian, to be the most favoured by developers everywhere except North America. This is clearly a market very much in flux. One research firm, ABI Research has just produced a report predicting that Linux will account for 70 percent of smartphone operating systems by 2012.

Today's smartphone will be tomorrow's standard phone and one of the key devices in the 'three screens' view of the market espoused by major players such as AT&T (the others being the PC and the TV). Importantly as the only one of the three that is uniquely 'personal' it could be the key to controlling the market for services delivered via the other two. (And as iTWire reported recently the head of AT&T has gone on record saying that the iPhone is critical to the company's consumer market strategy.