In a video interview today with Forbes, Frank Boulben, RIM's CMO, boldly stated that there will be more than 70,000 apps available for BlackBerry 10 when RIM launches its next generation smartphones and mobile OS in early 2013.

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This is quite a lofty goal on RIM's part to publicly state such a high number of apps available to users once it begins shipping BlackBerry 10 devices. Having 70,000 apps available at the launch of a brand new operating system seems very high, especially when you compare it to the amount of apps that were available when Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Palm began offering apps when their mobile OS' debuted.

To put things into perspective, when Apple launched the App Store on July 10, 2008 it had 552 apps available. When Google launched the Android Market on October 23, 2008 there were only 62 apps available. When Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7 on October 2010 it only had about 1,000 apps available. When Palm launched its webOS App Catalog on June 6, 2009, there were only 18 apps available and by December 9, 2011 that only grew to 10,002 apps, which is one of the main reasons HP killed webOS. So, it's pretty clear that when a brand new OS launches, it takes some time for developers to build applications for the OS and then the number of apps usually begins to rise steadily (not so in Palm's case).

If RIM can really have more than 70,000 apps available at the launch of BlackBerry 10, it will go down in history; if not, RIM better get ready to face some major backlash. RIM can't afford to make these kinds of mistakes. Didn't they learn a similar lesson after announcing that BlackBerry 10 and smartphones would ship by the end of 2012 only to announce a few weeks later that the OS and smartphones would have to be delayed until Q1 of 2013? If history is any kind of indicator of how things generally play out, this statement by RIM might come back to haunt and hurt them.

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