Ford is systematically trying to resurrect the Lincoln brand as a viable competitor to BMW, Audi, and Lexus. Unfortunately for Ford, the company has to do a lot more than simply build a good car that’s worthy of the price tag. The brand has been moribund for so long that it’s aged out of key demographics. People entering their thirties and just starting to earn enough income to think about buying a luxury car don’t think of Lincoln as an option. They’re looking at the brands that bankers, lawyers and Hollywood types are driving. Lincoln is not on that list.

I think tech companies can face the same challenge if they don’t keep their brands competitive. RIM is starting to develop a Lincoln problem with BlackBerry. Whole generations of smarpthone buyers are emerging who have never even held a BlackBerry. My two-year-old niece knows how to work the touchscreen of an iPhone or Android device. If you put a BlackBerry with a qwerty keyboard in her hands, she’d put it to her ear and say “Hello?” Then she’d throw it away and start playing with the iPhone again. That’s a heavy-handed metaphor for what’s happening with kids entering the workforce. In a BYOD world, how many 22-year-olds are going to bring a BlackBerry to work?

Postponing the BlackBerry 10 OS only compounds the problem. Some coupon web site with a silly name (CouponCodes4u.com) sent me some flash poll data aimed at gauging consumer reaction to the BlackBerry 10 news. The site polled 1,451 Americans aged 21-35. Twenty-one? How many 21-year-olds have even considered a BlackBerry?

No surprise that 29% of these people felt that BlackBerry products were not “as well designed or built” as they used to be. (Don’t young kids think that about most American cars these days?) And 59% of those surveyed said they didn’t own a BlackBerry. Why not? Well 52% of those who don’t own one cited the lack of personal and business apps, such as Instagram and Angry Birds while 53% also said that there “was nothing special” that the BlackBerry could offer them.  Does that sound like a Lincoln Town Car problem? It does to me.

RIM isn’t dealing with an “If you build it, they will come” situation here. Even if they get a great OS out to the market next year and it draws rave reviews from gadget blogs, there is no market for it. BlackBerry loyalists (those few who remain) will buy one, but you’re not going to win new customers from Apple and Android. It’s going to require more than a good product. Aaaaaand it’s going to require a brand revival. And I’m not talking about easy gestures like sponsoring the pre-game show for the NBA Finals or hiring Jennifer Lopez to drive around in a Fiat. It’s going to require a fundamental invigoration of the brand. Convince those pesky millennials that BlackBerry isn’t their granddad’s smartphone.

This summer Freakonomics Radio ran an episode titled “The Upside of Quitting,” which poked holes in the old adage “winners never quit and quitters never win.” Many people, the program argued, are unable to recognize that they have committed themselves to an endeavor that is failing. The more “sunk costs” someone has in such an endeavor, the less likely he or she is to give up on it.  No matter how hard it might be to admit it, sometimes it pays to just walk away and try something new.

And here we have Research In Motion (RIM), inventor of the once mighty BlackBerry, so popular a device that users dubbed it the “CrackBerry.” The BlackBerry was THE enterprise mobility device of the pre-iPhone era. A reliable platform for mobile email, contacts and calendars that offered mobility managers centralized control and rock-solid security, the BlackBerry made RIM a tech superpower.

That era of dominance is over. The ever-steepening decline of the BlackBerry, along with recent disasters like RIM’s global service outage, have a lot of people writing RIM obituaries. It’s prompted me to ask myself: Is it time for RIM to walk away from the BlackBerry?

RIM was almost too successful with the BlackBerry brand. The device is a household name while no one aside from IT managers and tech media know who RIM is. Mainstream marketing of any RIM device is pegged to the BlackBerry brand, not RIM.  RIM is a BlackBerry company. What else can it be?

We may find out the answer to that question soon. Android and Apple iOS devices have destroyed the BlackBerry’s share of the consumer mobile device market, and now it’s eating into RIM’s sweet spot: Enterprise mobility. Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) just announced that more than 30% of large enterprises (10,000+ employees) who are current BlackBerry users plan to migrate to a different platform within the next year. In its press release, EMA said:

“This represents a a significant reduction from the platform’s current domination of the large enterprise market space with 52% of mobile device users in that demographic actively using a BlackBerry device as part of their job function.”

RIM’s mobility architecture remains sound (despite the recent outage) but the company has struggled to keep pace with innovation in the device market. When Apple upended the smartphone industry with the iPhone in 2007, RIM responded with the BlackBerry Storm, an ill-fated try at a touchscreen smartphone that failed to catch on.

Then Apple’s iPad blew up the touchscreen tablet market and RIM responded with the PlayBook, which enjoyed strong early sales but got panned by gadget reviewers who said the software wasn’t fully baked. They also questioned RIM’s requirement that PlayBook users tether the tablet to a BlackBerry via Bluetooth in order to access native email and calendar applications. A nice security feature for enterprise IT, but ultimately limiting to users who were already impressed by the elegance of the iPad and some of the better Android tablets. Amid news that retailers were slashing PlayBook prices last month, gadget bloggers jumped on speculation by an investment analyst who suggested RIM had given up on the device, a rumor that RIM vehemently denied.

Then came this month’s service outage which turned 70 million BlackBerrys into bricks for several days. This has been a PR and customer service disaster, which prompted publications to come up with cute headlines like “RIM’s Outage: Nail in Coffin?” and “Is Research In Motion the walking dead?”

It’s clear that the BlackBerry is in serious decline. Does it pay for RIM to stick it out and keep investing in it? This week at the BlackBerry DevCon America conference, RIM unveiled BBX, its next-generation device operating system. BBX is a combination of BlackBerry OS and QNX (the PlayBook tablet operating system). In a market where Windows Phone 7, Android and Apple iOS are all winning over users, does it make sense for RIM to evolve the BlackBerry OS like this? We saw Palm try to do this with WebOS. That didn’t go so well. Nokia walked away from Symbian and embraced Windows Phone 7. Should RIM walk away from BlackBerry?

How would you do that…. give up on the brand that defines your company? At this point, is it the BlackBerry user experience that RIM can hang its hat on? Or is it its middleware (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) and its network operating centers (NOCs)? Is RIM’s strength in its devices or its architecture?

Last May RIM announced that it was extending BlackBerry Enterprise Server support to Android and iOS devices. Perhaps that’s where RIM’s future lies. Incorporate non-BlackBerry devices into the architecture that won the hearts and minds of IT managers everywhere. Build value there. Sink R&D into that, not the next-generation BlackBerry. It’s not clear that going in that direction will be enough. The market for a mobility architecture might not be as large as one for a hot, new smartphone, but at least it’s a new direction that might work. It’s just a question of whether RIM wants to let go of device that it has so much invested in. And BlackBerry needn’t give up on devices, either. Instead, it could develop Android or Windows devices that are completely tied into the RIM architecture? Can RIM do that? Does it want to?

Sometimes it pays to quit. It doesn’t have to mean defeat. It can mean that you’ve decided to fight another battle that you think you can win.

In a closed device platform, content providers have to go through a carrier to get to the pipe to get to their consumers. In an open device platform, the content providers go straight to the pipe which goes to their consumers — and this eliminates the middle man.

Take the two most popular enterprise and consumer devices right now: the BlackBerry and the iPhone. It’s not a mistake that they’re popular. Bowman explained that the “iPhone and BlackBerry are considered the most open devices,” and that plays a factor in which devices will live longer.

In addition to a longer shelf-life, these devices also have the potential for greater market penetration in coming years. According to Bowman, by 2013, 3G phone penetration will rise from 9% to 27% in the U.S.

Along with this, average revenue per user (ARPU) for data will rise 21% to 75% in the next five years — so after your kid graduates high school, you’ll no longer be talking on your device; texting will take over the majority of your communication.

As mobile devices grow stronger in their coverage and market share, they’ll grow proportionately in the stronghold of our lives.

“How many times do you think you will look at this device?” Bowman asked, holding up a gleaming BlackBerry to his audience. It’s shiny; it’s aesthetically pleasing…

“It’s like your watch,” he explains: It will catch your eye, so you’ll look down at it. You’ll be bored, so you’ll look down at it. When someone asks you what time it is, you’ll have to look back down at it even though you’ve just looked at it because you didn’t think to read it…and this is how it will be with your BlackBerry he says.

The BlackBerry will be something you will look at 500 times a day,” Bowman calculated.

Think of all that face value time you’ll have with your device! I can only imagine what Craig Raine (author of “A Martian Sends A Postcard Home“) would have to say about our phones now:

“In homes [briefcases?], a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores [lights up??] when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet, they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger. “

So my story on the iPhone’s enterprise features ended up being something of a counterpoint to the blog post that Amy Kucharik wrote in this space on Friday. In her tour through the blogosphere she found several experts who were more sanguine about the iPhone announcement.

In the reporting I did for my story, I found that analysts still had strong reservations about the iPhone as an enterprise smartphone. There are still some issues that have dogged the iPhone from the beginning, such as the single-carrier agreement with AT&T, the touchscreen keyboard that many QWERTY devotees reject, and the iPhone’s heritage as entertainment device.

Some of the analysts I talked to also had doubts about whether the SDK release would promote the development of many enterprise applications. Many third-party developers will likely go after the more lucrative consumer market instead. Others pointed out that ActiveSync support hasn’t helped other smartphones make much of a dent in the BlackBerry’s dominance of the push email space — so why should the iPhone be any different?

There’s no question that these announcements make it easier for iPhone owners to use their devices on the job. That is a big deal. So all this leaves me wondering, is this announcement aimed at convincing IT executives to deploy or support the iPhone in their companies? Or, is this announcement really about convincing consumers that they can use their iPhones on the job? My guess is, it’s the latter.

Early critics of the iPhone disliked its closed OS, which prevented third-party developers from creating new applications for the device. This limited the ways the phone could access corporate applications, most prominently, “push” email.

Now, Apple intends to open its software development kit by June, enabling the development of enterprise-worthy applications.

Jason Brooks speculates in his eWeek blog that the new apps will give the iPhone a leg up over RIM and Palm:

I expect that Treos will begin to wither in the eyes of one-time loyalists, and that erstwhile thumb-keyboard addicts will start to judge their BlackBerrys to be significantly sourer.

That’s good news for Apple fans; what’s perhaps even better news for network people is the integration of Cisco’s VPN client software. According to Network World blogger Jamey Hearey:

This will be a full blown IPSEC client that will even support the use of certificates or password based multi-factor authentication. Very nice! The iPhone VPN client will be able to connect to Cisco VPN gateway devices, like the Cisco ASA and older Cisco PIX.

Hearey, a security consulting systems engineer at Cisco, also points out that Apple announced its plans to support WPA with 802.1x authentication. “This will enable more enterprises to allow the iPhone to connect securely to their wireless infrastructure,” Hearey wrote.

Apple also opened an iPhone Enterprise Beta Program, through which enterprise developers can play with the 2.0 code before the official launch later this year. Check out Apple’s “iPhone Enterprise” page to read more about the program or view video of Steve Jobs making the announcement:
http://www.apple.com/iphone/enterprise/

It seems that the iPhone is unstoppable. Unfortunately, I won’t have one until they give them to you free with a three-year, $35/month service contract.

In an interview with Reuters, Balsille made it clear that RIM would be open to adding a touch-screen control feature to its BlackBerry line if that’s what the company’s customers want:

For sure we’re looking at all kinds of different device packaging and presentation. I think getting religious on packaging is not the way to go. It’s really user preference-oriented.”

At the same show in Barcelona this week, Sony Ericsson debuted its Xperia X1, a touch-screen smartphone that appears to be a direct response to Apple’s iPhone and other touch-screen announcements from HTC and Nokia.

Touch-screens are nice and all, but sometimes I wish my Tom Tom GPS had a keyboard. My fingers are just too big!

I haven’t seen an official announcement from AT&T about their iPhone enterprise offerings. So far, only the above link with feature and pricing options has turned up. But from what I can gather, this is more of a sales channel move than a product offering. This news won’t make IT managers feel warm and fuzzy towards the iPhone. Only accountants will be smiling.

No, this news doesn’t mean the iPhone is suddenly an enterprise-ready mobile device. All the concerns that Forrester Research voiced last month about its suitability for business use still apply. There is still no support for push email or third-party applications. Security is still a big problem, too, with no support for data encryption and no capability to remotely lock or erase lost devices. And the absence of a removable battery will still be a headache for road warriors.

This news is really about the accountants. It will now be easier for end users to request a device because your company’s accountants now have a direct channel for buying the iPhones and paying for the plans centrally instead of compensating individual users for deals they make on their own with AT&T.