Saturday, April 30, 2011

blackberry, microsoft shares tank: the apple/google tsunami in smartphones and tablets

apr 29th, 2011 CE

from 'good morning silicon valley':

 Shares of BlackBerry maker RIM are tanking today, more than 13.5 percent to about $48.90, after the Canadian company on Thursday slashed its forecast for the current quarter, whose results it will report in June. Research in Motion said it’s shipping fewer smartphones than expected. Its competition, of course, are the popular Apple iPhone and Android-based phones. (Motorola Mobility said yesterday that it narrowed its first-quarter loss based on shipments of Android smartphones, which nearly doubled.) Still, RIM said sales of its recently released PlayBook tablets are in line with its expectations, according to the Wall Street Journal. RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie pointed out that the company is making a transition to a new OS, and that “we have this company straight in the middle of the whole tablet mobile computing space.”

Microsoft shares are down sharply, about 4 percent to $25.60 this morning, after the software giant reported its third-quarter earnings yesterday. Despite posting sales and profit that beat analyst expectations, plus reporting strong sales of its Office suite and Kinect devices for the Xbox 360, the company also said that sales of its Windows operating system for PCs declined again. Much has been written, of course, about the growing popularity of iPads and other tablets, which use Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and other operating systems. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft CFO Peter Klein said Windows sales were weak partly because of a 40 percent decline in netbook sales in the third quarter. Microsoft is reportedly working on making Windows-based tablets more palatable. Windows-based netbooks, which are stripped-down PCs, were hot just a couple of years ago — till tablets entered the picture.

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