Here is the deal: Linkedin has become the best business social networking site- a rolodex in the cloud with access to all the people whose card you threw away so many years ago. Good. And they added discussions, file linkage, and tools to make it a virtual marketplace of ideas and skills for business. OK, good, but I meet people in meetings, in airports and generally away from access to the internet on my laptop. I want to be able to find out about them in Linkedin, add them to my Linkedin network, and generally use the service in my real world. Until this week, I could not do that efficiently on my BB. iPhone users could, in fact are on version 3 of the Linkedin app, and it works beautifully. So between them, BB and LI managed to fail until this week to present an option for the 42% of business smart phone users. Now I have the app, version 1 works, and I may have lost interest in both BB and LI because I have been watching my wife use her iPhone for work, and it works good.
Blackberry owns more than 42% (but a rapidly declining share) of the smartphone market. It has alway been the business person's tool for communication on the go. It works well. That its share declining rapidly, a full percent a quarter, may be related to the kind of issues that prevented Linkedin from fielding an app more quickly. The OS, while secure, is old and hard to develop for.
This article gives a recent look at brand loyalty and share between iPhone and BB.
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