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RIM Responds To an Employee's Open Letter
An anonymous reader writes "An executive at Research In Motion has written an open letter to the company's leadership, begging them to focus more on user experience, developers, and accountability. 'We urgently need to invest like we never have before in becoming developer friendly. The return will be worth every cent. There is no polite way to say this, but it’s true — BlackBerry smartphone apps suck. Even PlayBook, with all its glorious power, looks like a Fisher Price toy with its Adobe AIR/Flash apps.' RIM decided to address the letter, but their response completely skates over the issues. Unfortunately for them, the original letter triggered many more from current and former employees, who largely agreed with the need for better decisions at the top."
It's such a pity that RIM's response is basically "fuck off!" - way to bury their heads in the sand.
RIM is the AOL of the 20teens. The once juggernaut who will be a footnote a lot sooner than they might have thought.
I've got any number of users who are asking me how well our company integrates business features with iPhones and Android phones, and I keep telling them "well, decently, but not as good as with blackberry", and the thing is... none of them care. As contracts expire, phones die, or just as they get sick of their BBs, they're all going to iOS and android anyway cause the rest of the RIM experience is crap, and I don't blame them. I've got two phones on my waist, a droid and a curve, and I use the curve for email and phone calls. that's it. It's just inferior to the droid at, well, everything else.
BB executives don't have to "right the ship" at this point, they need to build a whole new boat, and instantly. Somehow, I don't see it.
Actually, if I ran a competing tech company and RIM fired this guy, I'd be calling him up as soon as I heard about it. The PR boost you would get from that would be enormous, and well worth the cost of this guy's salary. It would make it look like you actually care about all those things he claims RIM doesn't.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Having recently left RIM (BlackBerry Storm 2) for an Android (Galaxy S 2) I'm 100% happier. The Storm 2 had great potential, but was marred by RIM not innovating with apps and core functionality - it didn't even get an upgrade to BB OS6 despite being only 8 months old. That, I could have lived with, but the worst was they'd been saying all along that it WOULD. Suddenly, nope, it didn't. The advantage of RIM was always in email, and it still does email very well, but not so much better than iPhones and Androids anymore. BBM is equally being made redundant by things like PingChat. Its variety of market apps is poor and ridiculously expensive for mediocre apps. Finally, even when their phone is JUST onto the market, its already so far behind the curve. Processors, displays, memory... they all suck, making the phone a slow, unattractive smartphone for this day and age.
Zuki: Technical Tomfoolery
From basic observation I have seen execs moving from BlackBerry to iPhone & Android because the latter platforms are in fact now both capable of syncing reasonably well with Exchange.
BlackBerry is still a powerful platform for corporate email but they're mostly used for reading - rather than writing - email so the data entry & ergonomy for basic email operations isn't *killer* enough. On top of that new >200 DPI screens on Android & iPhone devices make reading much more pleasant. If you read a lot, then having hardware keys to scroll (I love being able to use space to page down on BB) is great though, but the text resolution is shit.
The thing most have missed so far is that the gadget that is invading the boardroom is the iPad. Meetings where everyone has a slide deck on their own tablet make sense, especially when (if indeed it isn't already out there but has escaped my attention) a collaboration tool allows slick collective annotation on iPad.
Many apps on BlackBerry are pretty awful, and my all-time favourite, viigo, was bought by BlackBerry and then almost instantly killed. It relied on a proxy to format RSS properly and serve it to the terminal, and the proxy never works any more. The new RIM News Reader app isn't available in my country. WTF? It was the only app that allowed RSS + Twitter (multiple accounts) + stocks + weather in one easy place.
Note also that the processing power on smartphones make BlackBerry appear exceptionally slow. RIM are going to lose, unless they bring back something a bit more *killer* in the corporate space. They have some interesting niches though, esp. for teen texting where BlackBerry does come into its own. iPhone text messaging is way sexier though, mostly thanks to the higher DPI.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
RIM's "app store" has as its lead product something for getting sports news. Wrong answer.
They should be focusing on being a really good business tool, and having applications for business users. Some examples:
That's what executives need, not Angry Birds.
Research in Motion have broken much-needed 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, and developers were simply thrilled to have two dead platforms and one that didn't work yet..
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
Perhaps "job ending" is more appropriate.
Keep in mind that the judgment of correctness is going to be made by the very people being called out. Don't get me wrong, I think this guy is right on - people like him that have the stones to tell it like it is, damn the consequences, are far too rare in my opinion. This is true in business and politics.
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
I'm not a fan of RIM products but I'd hate to see a Canadian company go the way of Commodore by having incompetent management run it into the ground.
The co-ceos need to be "FIRED" for cause for failing to do their jobs to protect shareholder equity and grow the business. They should not get any golden parachute and should be black balled from getting another CEO jobs in any publicly traded company.
Contrary to other commentaries, I do not believe Android is the answer. They need to work on QNX and develop a bridge API similar to Apple's Carbon to allow developers of BB apps to quickly port/recompile on their QNX platform.
They also need to refocus on their core competency which is corporate users. Get out of the BB for consumers market and focus their app world store on applications applicable to business users including getting apps like gotomeeting, join.me, Citrix receiver, Salesforce.com to work seamlessly on their future "superphones" and their tablets. Speaking of tablets, get a native email, calendaring and contacts client on their tablets. They need to have a "universal" app model for their tablet/superphone platform as well.
Finally, scrap the "Playbook" name. Think of something like "WorkBook", "WorkSlate", "WorkPad", "TaskBook", "TaskPad" , or "LaunchPad" instead. Not everyone is into football which I assume is where the playbook name comes from.
Basically, they have to either do that or sell off their hardware completely and get into the application market with BBM and BB Email clients for Android and iOS to compete with Good Technologies to offer "secure" corporate email on employee's personal smartphones and tablets that is kept encrypted and separate from the personal email. Think of it like a mini VM that just runs the BB stuff securely between the mobile device and the BES servers.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Jack Welch also had a philosophy of giving 80 percent of the rewards to 20 percent of the employees, and requiring a certain percentage of employees be fired as "underperformers" every single year after year. This is the fastest way I know to change an organization from being product and external competition focused to being process-laden and competing against itself internally.
A certain large software company we all love to bash has gone down this same road, and has many of the same problems that RIM is facing.
As for sending questionnaires to employees, good luck at finding employees who actually believe it would be listened to and not be used against them for speaking out against the current status quo.
There has been much talk about Microsoft's leadership failing due to "whatever" it is that the leadership can't seem to get beyond. Even with all this very public discussion, the leadership of Microsoft can't get their heads out of their asses to keep them from rolling.
It looks like RIM is in a similar position. And the fact that they publicly responded with doubt, suspicion and with a hint of anger, I would say they have a lot of trouble looking beyond their own egos as well.
RIM has huge potential in their own market. That market is always being threatened because that's the way the market works.
Do blackberry apps suck? I don't know -- I have never used blackberry apps other than the ones that came on the phone. There's certainly not a "market" in the sense that one exists for Apple and Android. Perhaps they need one too in order to remain interesting and relevant. But more than that, the game is more advanced now that Blackberry currently offers. And perhaps what they should be doing is leveraging their current client-server model so that apps live on servers and not just on clients. I'm already updating RIM with good ideas and I'm just a crappy, know-nothing who has used Blackberries and administered BESes. I know the product(s) and service(s) they offer and they have not evolved in the market significantly.
They are like the movie and music executives who are "risk averse" and simply want to remake the same things over and over again expecting to continue getting good results. The problem is, people get bored with the same things and the market is people.
And when Google, Microsoft, and Apple catch up to that feature set RIM is totally screwed. You've got a great short-term plan, but when you can lock down and control an iPhone to the same degree as a BlackBerry; but have way more usability and features available without the substantial cost of BES because you're using an ActiveSync reverse proxy, RIM is done.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
You are as clueless as the RIM CEOs. Angry Birds? The last thing a business platform needs are games. Android is not the solution because the evolution of that platform is in the hands of Google. Google does not have the best interests of its partners at heart. They are as slimy as MSFT.
BB becoming just another Android OEM is as stupid as Nokia becoming an OEM for Windows Phone 7.
RIM needs to concentrate on the business market and come up with a strategy to get their existing app ecosystem over to their new QNX platform.
They need to do that or get into the middleware/app business for other platforms.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Mostly I agree that Blackberry is very quickly losing the enterprise. Next January my phone contract will be up and I plan on getting a new Android phone to demo. If I can make everything work (calendaring, mail, etc) work with our enterprise, then I plan on ditching Blackberry by the end of 2012 for the whole company. I see no reason to keep Blackberry at this point. They went from being a year ahead of everyone to being at least 1 year behind, most likely 2.
However, don't forget that Blackberry really got it's start as a government provider. That's why the security has been ultra high and why it took them so long to get a phone with a camera. Because of those government contracts, they'll continue to exist for quite a while. I don't see those changing any time soon.
----- obSig
I remember people saying the same things about Apple. Companies with a respected brand name and some market share can release a killer product and recover. Shrinking market share often leads to very high margins and a more focused customer base, what RIM had when it essentially invented the smart phone.
The problems that open letter describes is applicable to countless American companies. I've said it many times before and I'll say it again: this is the end result of business, marketing and economics majors being in charge. Engineers and designers should have been in charge. They've got a better understanding of the technology and are far more likely to be passionate about their products. It's not a certainty that things would improve, of course, but the odds are that they would indeed be better off.
I'm not surprised that management glossed offer the letter. It's already too late, even if they wanted to do something about it they can't. They botched things long ago. If they had the ability to turn the company around they wouldn't even be in this situation right now.
I think it is you that misses the point.
The CEO wants to play Angry Birds, so everybody gets iPhones. I've actually seen this happen at a few companies.
Many winters ago I was in a similar position, had to tell my bosses what I thought was wrong and the result was of-course that my contract was prematurely terminated within days from the moment I opened my mouth. Would I have done the same thing over if I could go back in time?
absolutely.
You can't handle the truth.