The way we see it, if they were going to come up with something that could compete with the iPhone, they would have done it by now, right? Not saying they’re going to die. They’re too big and too established to die. Instead, they’ll dwindle. The latest market research shows it’s already happening.

Some outfit called ChangeWave does a quarterly smartphone survey, and the latest one is great news for us and devastating for everyone else. Check out the chart on who owns which smartphone:

So, okay. RIM is ahead of us. But look at the trend lines and ask yourself, who would you rather be? Yeah. Me too.

Then check out the chart on the growth in smartphones in general:

Again, follow the trend line. More than one-third of the people surveyed now own a smartphone, and it’s only going up from here. Eventually we get to a place where pretty much everyone has a smartphone — where we don’t even call them “smartphones” anymore, because every phone is a smartphone, so they’re just phones.

Thing is, we saw this market coming, and got in just as the wave was curling up and getting huge. And now we are so far ahead of everyone in this space that it’s not even funny. Sure, RIM has a great business — a great legacy business. They’ll milk it, and play defense, and protect their enterprise position. Fine. We’ll grow up all around them and dwarf them. They’re gone. They’re history.

So is Nokia, by the way. Which is why they’re suing us. Notice the timing of that lawsuit? Just days after they announce a lousy quarter where they lose six points of market share and post a net loss.

They’re both history. They’re stuck with obsolete software platforms, and they’ll never catch up. WinMo, same boat. Palm WebOS? Too late for them. Android? Too much fragmentation. No, friends, the game is ours to lose. Of course that was the case back in the 1980s with personal computers, and we managed to screw the pooch that time. But now we’ve learned from our mistakes. We have, really. This time there is no stopping us.