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RIM Struggles Continue
dave562 writes with news of continued difficulties for Research in Motion, who yesterday announced a drop in profits, product delays and layoffs, causing their stock to plunge over 20%. "Why did RIM experience delays? Because RIM recognized that the current hardware wasn't cutting it, and had to upgrade to more powerful chipsets, co-chief executive Mike Lazaridis said. The first will be the BlackBerry Bold 9900 that RIM recently showed off." An article at the Wall Street Journal speculates that the company needs to be taken over or broken apart. "RIM’s operating system could be an intriguing purchase for Hewlett-Packard, which now owns the lovely but unpopular Palm operating system for smart phones. Handset makers like Motorola might be lured to buy The Astonishing Tribe, a Swedish company RIM recently bought that designs snazzy interfaces for smart phones. Patent companies, Google or other tech companies could scoop up QNX, the software company behind the PlayBook tablet computer, and RIM’s BBM messaging platform."
Early leaders in their respective fields, but then got lazy because they didn't think their customers would go anywhere.
Then technologies and features got old and stale, and by the time they realized it, it could never catch up again.
These days, both RIM and slashdot are pretty much doing a slow drain around the bowl. Sad, because you remember what once was, and what could have been.
HP can do for RIM what they did for DEC and Palm... and er, HP.
The RIM tablet version 1.0 was unable to access email without tethering. I mean...what were they thinking? Time to parter with Microsoft or face the Abyss.
Look! Let's buy out another failing company with a somewhat-interesting product to replace the last failing company with a somewhat-interesting product we bought. That'll totally work.
It's like when they bought Colubris to replace their Symbol OEM APs, only to buy 3Com a little while later. I dunno, maybe they can squeeze some money out of it.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Research in Motion have broken new barriers with the PlayBook tablet, a BlackBerry that can’t read email. And needs to be tethered to a phone.
“We feel a technology preview is just the thing we need to fight iPhone and Android in the consumer market,” said founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis. “The missing core functionality should be seen as areas of spectacular potential. Also, the board has ascertained that you should stay away from the brown acid, it’s not so good.”
The PlayBook has launched remarkably, with thousands of the devices being recalled for crippling operating system bugs straight after release.
In a double-tap Osborne through the head, the PlayBook uses the new QNX BlackBerry OS, which does not run current BlackBerry apps, will not be available on phones for another year and will not work on any current BlackBerry device. This is separate from OS 7, to be released soon, which will also not work on any existing BlackBerry. RIM’s present mobile carrier partners were “overwhelmed” to be stuck with so much already-obsolete stock.
RIM led the world into the smartphone era, several years before Apple’s iPhone turned everyone into the sort of twat you only ever used to see carrying a BlackBerry.
Technology industry rumours suggest a Microsoft takeover of RIM, considered an excellent match in competence and vision. “Synergy’s just another word for two and two makes one!” said Steve Ballmer. “We will assimilate your technological stench of death into our own.”
http://rocknerd.co.uk
When they had a superior product they were on top. They failed to realize the threat the iPhone presented, and Google saw the potential of touch interfaces and joined the race on time.
RIM thought they were untouchable and when they decided to move it was a rushed response that came too late.
The only salvation I see for RIM is to embrace Android.
Port the encryption and infrastructure, along with the marvelous keyboards they make to Android and I'm sure they'll survive. Or even grow. Nothing is stopping them from trying and remember that they could even skin android to look like a blackberry. But it'd run aps and have an awesome browser and all the google utilities...
When is the last time you have used blackberry phone ?
2 minutes ago.
The blackberry is still far superior for Exchange email and calendaring than any Android or iPhone device that I've tried.
Several execs in my company tried to move to shiny new iPhones, but all of them came back to Blackberries. Well, some carry both a BB and iPhone.
I've always thought of RIM as Palm Pilot, the next generation. The same people who bought the first PDA's from Palm were the first to use Black Berries. Carrying contacts and calendars around was, and is, a very good thing. But, when Black Berries did that, plus email, Palm's weren't competitive anymore. It took awhile, but Palm has all but disappeared (I know, Palm is now buried in HP somewhere.)
Well, email on a phone isn't a big selling feature anymore. It's all about the apps and web access. Email is just the bare minimum - a minimum that RIM couldn't even meet on their Playbook tablet launch (WTF!?)
So... as a Canadian, I'm sad to see RIM's decline. The game isn't over yet, there's still value in the Enterprise and Government sectors... for a while anyway. But, I think their days as a consumer brand are numbered. There really isn't room for 4 platforms in the mobile space... even 3 platforms is pushing it. iOS and Android are here for at least the medium term. Windows Phone and RIM have to fight it out for a distant #3.
If I had to bet, within 5 years, Microsoft will buy either all of RIM, or the pieces - both largely serve the corporate markets.
The blackberry is still far superior for Exchange email and calendaring than any Android or iPhone device that I've tried..
That's the problem. They're great at that and not much else. iPhones and Androids are good at email and good at a whole bunch of things. I guess the market for really hardcore email / Exchange integration isn't all that big.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
This story needs a nice bitcoin tie-in. For example, what is the values of RIM in bitcoin?
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
As an iOS user, what is this 'true choice' you speak of, enlighten me.
Jonathanjk.com
Disclaimer: I'm a RIM employee.
We're not worried. We pulled in $700mil in profit last quarter. The market somehow believes that we're going out of business as a result. Our market cap is now less than our annual revenue. What kind of sense does that make?
Sure the product needs some work. If you think we're sitting idly on our hands, your wrong. But we're not exactly losing money, and we're a company with no debt and a $3B pile of cash. This stock market mess has made us an _amazing_ acquisition target, but we're nowhere near closing our doors.
if youre not worried you should be. you could say the same for nokia and look what that turd is doing. and BTW what the fuck were you guys thinking with the playbook ? throw out your turd of an OS and put your stuff on android. you dont know how to code -- get over it.
Port the encryption and infrastructure, along with the marvelous keyboards they make to Android and I'm sure they'll survive. Or even grow.
I had a company-issued blackberry for about a decade. Each year or 18 months or so they would get refreshed, and I'd get the latest model. The early models were solid and great in almost every way, but each subsequent model was worse than the one it replaced. They haven't made a decent keyboard in at least 5 years. Their screens got more pixels and more colors each year, but the overall quality of the screens got slowly worse. My employer supports iOS now, and I'm happy to never have to touch a blackberry again.
I also did some app development for blackberry devices, and I can tell you without a doubt they have the worst platform, the worst tools, and it's obvious they never cared about making development workable. I only ever saw one third-party non-game app that was decent, and I estimate it took 15 people 6 months to build that. Compare this to some of the iOS and Android apps that a single person can put out with a couple weeks worth of effort.
Going with Android seems like it would be akin to starting over. I don't see what assets they have that HTC or Samsung don't have. They have their Enterprise Server thing, but I don't understand what advantage that has over Exchange + ActiveSync which every other platform seems to support. I would be happy to be enlightened about what advantages Rim might have left.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
What we need now is the creation of standardized and open handset form factors and open handset hardware which is also to a degree standardized.
The Android platform is a defacto hardware standard. This hardware really isn't that sophisticated -- ARM cores, common chipsets, Android can be made to run on an iPhone after all, there's really no barrier to a manufacturer, as long as they use ARM.
Android handset manufacturers have it a bit better with a common OS, but they still have to churn out a new device practically every few months to remain relevant. [...] Only problem with Apple is that they are only in it for themselves and do not like the idea of giving their users true choice.
"Churning out" a new device every few months is the way manufacturers provide "true choice." You can either buy the 4G phone with a kickstand and an undeleteable Blockbuster app, or a Sprint phone with a hardware keyboard and is locked to Eclair, or a slider with MOTOBLUR. And none of these ever get their software updated without an act of congress, thus justifying the next phone in the churn cycle. Behold consumer choice.
Apple succeeds at remaining relevant, as you say, probably because their product and platform maps to consumer demand very well, and their platform doesn't try to recreate the, uh, "dynamism and competition" of the Wintel PC market, circa 1995 (an era in the history of computing I would consider one big, abominable mistake). Of course Apple is "only in it for themselves," unlike the well-known altruists at Samsung and Google.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Why does everything have to be open? the "built it yourself" PC market is a niche for geeks. Most computers sold now are laptops which may as well be made by the person selling you the OS as they're not built to any generic standard internally. So why aren't people complaining about the laptop market not being "open"?
RIM isn't dying because they have a bad product, they are dying because they are a phone associated with business and consumers wanting a personal phone don't want a phone from a stuffy business orientated vendor.
RIM had one or two killer ideas, Push Email and Remote Wipe. Both are commonplace elsewhere now, although Push Email tends to be done differently on non-RIM devices due to their patent.
RIM released a tablet computer that has none of their strengths in corporate phones, no email, no 3G connectivity and the usability was criticised too, O2 in the UK refuse to sell it for that reason.
I'd be worried if I were you. RIM's market share is being eaten into like crazy by Apple and all the 'Droids. I know of two medium sized companies in the last nine months who have dropped Blackberries for iPhones. I think the tide has turned.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
um.. do you still have a job? I mean.. with layoffs and all.
That's what Nokia said.
Woopdie do, you pulled in $700m in profit last quarter. Your competitors pulled in $6B and $2.3B (Apple and Google). They are eating your market share faster every day. Further, with increased pressure from IT managers to reduce infrastructure, your model of dedicated support hardware just doesn't make sense anymore. Keep fighting the good fight, but the market is reacting not to your current performance but to your future prospects.
You lost 5% of market share of new phone sales(30%-25%), and your market share dipped to 8.2 from 8.6 from just January to April. Apple is raking in the cash on their devices and you guys were there first.
If you think we're sitting idly on our hands, your wrong
I didn't know Lazaridis had a
Trolling is a art,
Agree 1000%. The Bold is what brought RIM from a corporate tool to the mainstream, and then they shit the bed by trying to gain marketshare by diluting the brand with cheap toy phones. They need to cede the toy marketplace to Apple and Android, and innovate and compete in the "really good communication tool" marketplace. The people who buy phones because of the bling factor are going to be awful customers anyway. Be the Mac of the phone world: develop and deliver on an idea that their hardware is expensive, and worth every penny. (Apple, sadly, has the reputation, but not the delivery.)
U.S. Government is a big buyer of Blackberries. See the recent article here on Slashdot about gov't gadgets for numbers. They're a big chunk of your profit. And as soon as the iPhone or Android gets FIPS certified you will lose most of your U.S. Government business overnight.
Right now, most of the people I know in gov't use Blackberries only because they're forced to. Not a week goes by where I don't have users asking me when they can use their iPhone, iPad or Android device and return the BB.
We're piloting iPads and Samsung Android tablets now.
Oh, and thanks for making the BES compatible with iOS and Android devices. That'll smooth our transition when we dump your crap.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I'm a potential RIM customer.
Can you explain to me concisely, in a few sentences, why I should choose the products of your company over competitors - most notably, Apple? What would I gain by picking a Blackberry phone over iPhone, or (especially) a Playbook over iPad?
I'm also a developer, potentially targeting RIM platforms.
Can you explain to me concisely, why I should target your devices, and not, say, iOS or Android, for my next mobile application? If you rather suggest that I target them and Blackberry, then what is your portability story (other than "you have to write your app for our platform from scratch")?
The answers to those questions are what drives the perception of RIM as a failing company.
Well, sorry to say, but based on the current state of RIM's products it appears that they're being designed by PHB's with no clue what people actually want. I mean, seriously, wtf is up with the Playbook?
Seriously, WTF is wrong with the PlayBook? Of all the tablets on the market, it's the only one I find attractive.
I know, "native email" -- which I don't care about even a little bit. As a BB user, I have neither the need nor the desire to have native email support on the tablet. Bridge gives me everything I want, with company-friendly security. Outside of that, and a buggy launch, it's a ridiculously good tablet.
Releasing an Android just doesn't make any sense to me -- they'd be "just another Android tablet". The UI is astonishing, and you'd only get hate for trying to push an new UI on Android, even one as slick as that seen on the PB.
I shouldn't need to sell QNX to a slashdot user, so I won't bother. Honestly, RIM release an Android tablet -- absolutely ridiculous.
Required reading for internet skeptics
The blackberry is still far superior for Exchange email and calendaring than any Android or iPhone device that I've tried.
You're probably right but the fact of the matter is that the world is moving away from just Exchange and calendars to collaboration and tying in several different messaging protocols like email, IM, VoIP, video and cellular comms into one single client on a mobile device - so, for example, you can be halfway through a conference call on your business phone, decide you need to leave the office and seamlessly transfer the call to you cellular phone. Or maybe have voicemails emailed to you as attachments. Or register what communications protocols you have available for others to contact you on by using SIP presence.
The company I work for does all that kind of stuff and whilst there are Blackberry clients for all that stuff we do, they also exist for iPhone and Android.
So what I'm trying to say is that Blackberry may well have provided unparalleled connectivity to Exhange email and the like up to this point in time, but because business communications are themselves changing, software manufacturers like us treat BB, iPhone and Android with equal importance and therefore BB now has to compete at the same level with those other devices.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
It's worth noting that companies like VMware are working on virtualization technology for Android. This would allow handsets to switch between work and home OS images, allowing consumer handsets to be used during work time as secure corporate handsets.
It's possible this could become attractive to the enterprise... no BES, and you can repurpose equipment the employee already owns.
Information wants to be beer.
You don't understand Blackberry. Companies do not use Blackberries the same way individual consumers who purchase service from a phone company use Blackberries. BTW the individual consumer model is also the way iPhones and Android phones work. The consumer model has no way of providing secure communication. The corporate model does.
Each company using Blackberries has a Blackberry server at their company that talks to their email servers. RIM doesn't have access to this data. The data is then encrypted and passed back and forth to the Blackberry devices. Again, RIM doesn't have access to this data because it is encrypted. Only emails to public addresses are accessible. iPhones and Android phones do not have a way to provide secure communication within a company using their devices as RIM/Blackberry does, and this is why iPhones and Android phones are NOT suitable for business. And then there is Google mail where you are just giving them your data to mine.
Internal company emails sent by Blackberry are not accessible/readable by anyone outside the company, including RIM. i.e. Company emails are confidential. Google emails are not confidential, and Google will know everything that you discuss about your company that is in your emails, even if the emails are between employees of said company. If you are happy with sharing confidential information with Google, then go ahead. Most companies of any size are not.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Better call quality
I have no idea what you mean - i.e. how BB is special in that regard - but I haven't had any problems with call quality on a variety of phones (iPhone and a bunch of Android ones) over the last few years. It's "good enough", and I don't see what I'd gain from it being any better. So not a notable point.
physical keyboard
That's a subjective preference. I'll give you that it can be a big selling point for some. Fine, now what if we compare against Android - where there are a bunch of phones with physical keyboards, in various form factors?
secure email
What's not secure about SSL?
BBM
I had no idea what that is, so I looked up on Wikipedia. I stopped reading at the second sentence, which said "communication is only possible between two BlackBerry devices". None of the people I know use a BB device as a personal phone. Heck, for that matter, none of my colleagues use a BB device as a work phone. For the most part, it's iPhone and Android.
More portable
Or you could say "smaller screen". Also very much a subjective point.
is tied to your BB
That's not a positive thing.
so your data is stored consistently in one place
On my Android phone & tablet, mail is stored "in the cloud", and contacts, bookmarks etc are all synced via the same. So my data is consistent, and even if I lose both devices I'll still have it - and yet the devices themselves are completely independent of each other.
better video format support, flash
I don't consider those major selling points over iPad, from personal experience of using phones and tablets (despite the fact that my Android devices can show it, I think I've used the capability only once in the last few months). That said, again, what if you compare vs Android?