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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.
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.
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.