RIM co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis have stepped aside to let a new leader pilot RIM through the straits. Thorsten Heins, a hardware executive from Siemens, has been COO for about a year now. Welcome, Mr. Heins, to a rough sea and dark night. But there is light in the depths of the hold. (Okay, enough ship references. Down to business.)

Here's the straight story: RIM has been focused on the wrong assets for the past three years, competing in a consumer market against the most powerful consumer brands in the world and suffering from tablet night terrors. It's not working. Forrester's data is clear: Based on a survey of 5,000 US information workers in May 2011, RIM's share of employee smartphones has dropped from around 90% to only 42% in the US in the past three years. Apple and Android together now have 48% of that installed base.

Stop fighting the consumerization battle. Fight a battle that takes advantage of what made RIM a fabulous company in the first place: its secure data delivery network. Here's the differentiated asset analysis:

With this analysis in hand, the challenge and the opportunity become clear. It's the business and government IT relationships and the RIM secure global data network that differentiate RIM products and services, not the consumer market demand. No other mobile supplier in the market has foreign governments asking for access to its data network in the interest of their national security. (That government interest is a good thing -- it signals just how potent RIM's network is.)

Last week, HP announced it would discontinue the TouchPad and all webOS-based products. This was a dramatic reversal in strategy; just a few months ago (in March), I attended HP’s analyst event, during which HP CEO Leo Apotheker presented webOS as a central tenet of HP’s consumer product strategy and said the TouchPad was “the first of hundreds” of devices that would be running webOS, including printers and PCs.

Happy New Year!

And with the new year, we're implementing a change. In the past months the Data Digest was always based on Forrester's global Consumer Technographics® data. From now on, once a month we'll highlight data from Forrester Forrsights for Business Technology (formerly named Business Data Services).*

In the past year we've looked a number of times at consumers' mobile Internet behaviors and attitudes. But how do enterprises feel about mobile Internet? And which operating systems do they support. My colleague Michele Pelino recently published a report called 'Managing Mobile Complexity' covering these — and many other — questions.

From an enterprise perspective, BlackBerry (RIM) tops the list big time — seven out of 10 enterprises in the US and Europe support this operating system — followed by Microsoft Windows and the Apple iPhone.

But it is important to recognize how quickly enterprise support of new types of mobile device operating systems, particularly those used in Apple iPhones and Android smartphones, has risen in the past year. For example, in 2010, approximately 30% of surveyed enterprises officially support and manage Apple iPhone devices, up from 21% in 2009. We have seen an even larger year-over-year jump in the percentage of enterprises supporting Android devices from Google, Motorola's Droid, Sprint's HTC EVO 4G, and others.

With today’s announcement of the PlayBook tablet PC, BlackBerry is launching a huge bid to try to retain any customers who have not yet fled to the iPhone and iPad.

Due to be released in early 2011, there is a lot for CIOs to like about the new PlayBook. BlackBerry is hoping that by making the PlayBook easy to integrate into the enterprise, and leveraging its much touted encryption security so much in the news lately, CIOs will back the PlayBook over the iPad.

The PlayBook will be compatible with BlackBerry Enterprise Server and, when paired through Bluetooth to an existing BlackBerry Smartphone, will use the phone as a data transport, only temporarily caching content on the PlayBook.

Some features of the new PlayBook make it very desirable when compared to today’s iPad, such as support for Adobe Flash, Mobile AIR and HTML5; symmetric multiprocessing; built-in HD cameras front and back (think HD video-conferencing); microUSB connection and HDMI output. To control all of this the PlayBook will use a new operating system based on the QNX Neutrino microkernel architecture. What we don’t know: how long the battery will last (a big selling feature for iPads is its long battery life); and what price the PlayBook will sell for. Without seeing a PlayBook up close, it’s hard to say how these features compare to an iPad. After all, one of the most elegant things about an iPad is how it feels - you feel an almost instant connection to the device.