[deleted] It’s not a question of the size of the company; it’s a question of market share. During their heyday, RIM virtually owned its market; it was theirs to lose. BBM still had its die-hard users, even after the introduction of the iPhone. It wasn’t until Apple lifted the entire concept and created the security nightmare known as iMessage that things started to really change in the consumer world.
Apple was never particularly good at implementing standard protocols, and always had problems. It was one of the things I have always despised about their platforms. A test I did years ago showed the sorry state of their software. I had a Windows PC running Thunderbird, a BlackBerry 7 OS phone on the mobile network, and a modern, high-end Mac OS X system running Apple’s Mail. All were configured to check my mail account on the same IMAP server. Consistently, when a message arrived, Thunderbird notified first, followed about a second later by the BlackBerry (over the mobile network, via BIS!); the Mac took its sweet time, often taking a few minutes longer, while being on the same LAN as the mail server. I tested an iPhone a few years later, and it was worse, to say nothing of the horrendous UI in Apple’s mobile mail client; I haven’t considered actually owning an iPhone ever since.
When they get to define the protocols themselves, they sometimes get away with it. Even if they’re sloppy, they don’t share the details of their protocol definitions with anyone else, so nobody would know. But again, the number of times they have had to correct, update and re-work the iMessage protocol should tell you something.
Back to the topic at hand, they are stubbornly insisting on making the same sorts of mistakes that RIM did, with their user-hostile policies, mistreatment and cheating of their developer community, lock-in, refusal to inter-operate, etc. Maybe there is nobody left who remembers the lessons from when they were going down the drain, but there is one thing they should never allow themselves to forget: it’s the critical applications and third-party software that make the platform, and the lack thereof that can break it. NEVER betray your developers; if just the right ones leave, Apple could be in very big trouble.
You say that they have “so many” products. That was one of the mistakes they were making (to a much greater extent) when they nearly died the last few times. Furthermore, many of them are fairly closely tied to iOS and its derivatives. If that platform dies, most of their revenue will dry up. Also, now that they have alienated many of their former core professional market, I wouldn’t bank on the fact that what’s left of the Mac platform would sustain them, if iOS turned into a wasteland. The whole company might not implode, but like RIM, they would be a shadow of their former selves, and they would have only themselves to blame.