I'm happy about the acquisition. I think it'll speed up innovation and solidify Microsoft in the smartphone market. I think it'll help our site grow too.
Unfortunately, I think the casualties are BlackBerry and CrackBerry. BlackBerry and CrackBerry will go the way of Palm and webOSNation.
It could be argued that BlackBerry needed their own "burning platform" memo. Every other major manufacturer started their reformation early. Microsoft ditched Windows Mobile 6 because, despite being loaded with features, it wasn't a OS for the future. Check out this
walkthrough from 2009. It was slow, laggy and pretty ugly by today's standards. Microsoft realized that wasn't the platform that was going to run the latest and greatest apps. And let's not forget that eventual kernel rewrite necessary to unify WM and Windows 8. From a technical standpoint, WM just wasn't ready. Then Nokia watched as Symbian became stagnate. A problem compounded by developing Maemo, Meebo and feature phones. Never mind trying to do the cloud, music, movies, apps, enterprise and the OS(s). Nokia was drowning in development. Both companies looked at what they had and made a hard decision.
RIM (as they were back then) failed to realize that part of their popularity came from being the de facto "premium" smartphone brand. Enterprise used it for security reasons but consumers used it because there weren't any viable alternatives aside from WM. Then the iPhone and Android came along, totally flipping the script. Consumers finally had a "large screen," full touch device with apps like they've never seen before. WM and BlackBerry simply weren't ready to compete. Microsoft did the hard thing and ditched WM. RIM stuck with BB7 too long and took forever getting QNX/BB10 to the market. If you thought WP7 was late to the party, BB10 came right after the bartender said "last call." RIM relied too heavily on their brand name, expecting mass market consumers to weather the storm. RIM needed to recognize that BB7 was burning but just held on to the dream too long. RIM isn't dead and will be here for years to come, but may only exist as a niche for product businesses.