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."

Comments

Balls

[molnarcs]

That guy certainly had balls. He's basically asking the CEOs of the company to resign, along with half the management. And if half of what he writes is true (and based on other employee reaction, it seems to be), they should go! I found the links in the open later very interesting as well. I have no love for Apple, their vision of the future of computing quite frankly scares me - I prefer to decide myself what is or isn't appropriate for my consumption (censoring Ulysses ffs?!). That said, there are a lot to be admired about Apple - their marketing strategies, their organization and management techniques, etc. I never saw the linked keynote, and I found it quite interesting. The second link to the video about leadership/marketing was equally interesting.

It's such a pity that RIM's response is basically "fuck off!" - way to bury their heads in the sand.

RIM is losing in the Enterprise too

[fruey]

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.

Wrong apps

[Animats]

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:

• GetMeThere - a travel application for executives. You want to get somewhere, it figures out how and makes all the arrangements. It knows where you are, it knows your company travel policies, it knows your frequent flyer information, it knows your preferences, it knows about travel delays, and it knows how to talk to all the reservation systems. Including NetJets. The iPhone travel applications have all that data, but are too dumb to put it together.
• ExceptionMonitor This ties in with corporate systems to report exceptions. If something was supposed to ship by Thursday, and it didn't, you get an alert. Monitors key ratios for your business while you're out of town, too.
• BackgroundCheck Check out a company or an individual. Connects to Dun and Bradstreet, Hoovers, corporate registration information, criminal records, etc.

That's what executives need, not Angry Birds.

Shareholder revolt needed ASAP to save RIM

[aristotle-dude]

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.