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An Inside Look At the Rise and Fall of RIM
zacharye writes with this excerpt from BGR:
"Research In Motion is in the midst of a major transition in every sense of the word. Publicly, the company is portraying a very defensive image — one that is very dismissive, as if RIM is profitable and class-leading, and the media is out of line to criticize its business, as are investors. Internally, however, there's a different story to be told. It's a story filled with attitude, cockiness, heated arguments among the executive team and Co-CEOs, and paranoia. ... The three-year roadmap for RIM products focused on refining the technology in phones had already been released, rather than looking at where to add major new componentry or trying to identify or even shape future trends. 'One of the main reasons RIM missed the mark with the browser was because
they were always proud of how little data usage a user would use,' a former executive said. 'There was no three-year plan at RIM.'"
With the end of unlimited data plans shouldn't RIM be positioned to make a comeback?
More like going around and around in circles followed by the urge to brush your teeth.
RIM was cool back in the day when data was super-expensive. They came up with a then-innovative end-to-end service to cut data consumption to a trickle.
Those days are over, people want streaming video, full email, full browsers, etc. on their phones.
Trolling is a art,
Doesn't their "three-year roadmap" conflict with the company name?
If RIM was smart, they would use the Droid platform running on another CPU core. That way, users could have both a BB that corporate users and developers want, why tapping into the popular droid market for future expansion. Eventually, they could migrate 100% toward the Droid platform with some additional BlackBerry APIs glued on to it.
When you're not in the position to negotiate, sometimes you have to dance with the elephant.
Life is not for the lazy.
Arrogance rarely wins, why is it so popular?
they're probably pissing off a lot of their customers by preventing them from deleting apps that are of no use to them, for example, MySpace
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/7/5/wanna-be-the-ceo-of-nokia-take-the-simple-quiz.aspx
It is a little scary and sad to see the parallels in these two once giants make so many mistakes. Not that they are making the same mistakes but they both clearly have one thing in common: inept top level leadership.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
RIM needs to do what Jobs did to next in the mid 1990s. It's time for them to accept that their phone business is cooked. Nobody is waiting a week out in front of any stores to buy a RIM device. Nobody even knows what differentiates one device from another. It's 2011, not 1991, cellphone sets are widespread and the market has spoken, nobody wants a RIM phone.
RIM needs to get out of the hardware business, and port their mail reader to an application and sit on top of android, iOS, and Windows mobile (lol).
They need to focus on making BES suck less, and getting their application into as many hands as possible.
Loose the hardware, nobody will miss it.
I remember going to sit with the CMO of one of the largest wireless carriers, and we would deliver features like “increase battery life by 40%” in the next model, and we would get a blank look on the other side of the conference room.
Funny, that's exactly why I like my BlackBerry. I doubt the company is going to go under...I still see plenty of new BlackBerries. They should just stick to the low-end of the market and create cheap, reliable devices.
I always wondered how much the of this is volcal idiocy.
Sure, the RIM device isn't an i-Phone... but it isn't an i-Phone. Truth is they sold into a market they weren't in 5 years ago, and that's the brain dead consumer market. The brain dead consumer doesn't care how much data their phone uses 'till they get the bill and they don't care that it supports bluetooth sim access profile with 3W car phones untill they find out that it doesn't. They care that there isn't 5000 useless apps that are all pimped by a 3rd party and they don't notice copy and paste doesn't work until the 3rd software version.
...next appears to be RIM. Is there something wrong with Canadian tech giants?
I have always asked myself why Canada is the only major industrialized country without a car name synonymous with it.
USA has GM, Italy has Fiat, UK has Landrover/Rover, Japan has Toyota, Germany has Mercedes/BMW, France has Peugeot, Russia has Lada...but Canada has...?
I read the first paragraphs and then skimmed further into it. What I got was "RIM started out well but then didn't really do anything new or good after that."
Okay, let's be clear on what RIM and Blackberry are and what they are not. RIM and Blackberry are about business. They target business users and cater to the needs of business. What they are not and never have been is a pop consumer devices. Many of the comments were targeting recent trends in phones such as iPhone and Android and the like. As much as I like my Samsung Galaxy phone, it's a consumer device just as the iPhone is. Both can be retrofitted with "needed business features" but from its core to its shell, RIM and Blackberry are business first and foremost.
RIM is not going anywhere just yet. They have their place. Business and government want central control and management of their infrastructure and Blackberry can be used as an extension of their infrastructure in ways that others do not... not yet anyway. (And I presume some of that is based on patents held by RIM.)
And I am rather disappointed that people these days are unable to look down the road or even back up the road where they came from. I think market trends are good to watch as it is an indicator of what works, what doesn't, what's long-term and what isn't. The iPhone/Android battle makes the market exciting. It's a catalyst for change and improvement... or it would be if it weren't for every business with an "on the internet" patent trying to sue one another to death. It's certainly very lively, I'm sure all will agree. But moving at a rapid pace when you already have a steady market niche would present further risk to RIM that isn't really present for the likes of Apple, HTC or Samsung.
While Android and iPhone are used in many business environments, only Blackberry doesn't compromise the sovereignty of the business over its data. Apple wants to control all iPhones and the apps that go on them. Android is anarchy. Blackberry provides tools of control and configurability to business over even those of the phone carrier. (For example, using a BES, I was able to turn on tethering for a phone whose carrier did not permit it.) This is important to business people who understand the difference. (Unfortunately, since executives are prone to buying the pie-in-the-sky "cloud" idea for everything, what business people are willing to understand is demonstrably limited.)
The basic notions that made Blackberry great from the beginning are still valid today. The things I see happening in the industry right now is a lot of glitz and eye candy but not so much in the way of new ideas. RIM isn't making a lot of noise right now, but they don't have to. If RIM wanted to play in the Android market or to create yet another line of phones, they would do so at the peril of their core market. If I were RIM and felt it were necessary, I would create a new brand and not call it Blackberry at all so that people would know the difference. RIM has something that no one else has and they need to stay with it.
There will be a lot of people without RIM jobs.
RIM will always survive off a fairly large niche group of users. The article mentions RIM placing battery life and speakerphone volume and build quality/durability over features such as an mp3 player or camera. I for one support this approach which is why I will continue to purchase blackberry phones...I'm sure there are more than a few people right now that have a blackberry next to them that's survived many years of abuse.
Remember Palm? How they watched as the tech passed them by and never quite caught up. In their heyday, they had the market cornered for PIMs and saw the smartphone just kill them off. Their attempts to become relevant again were feeble at best.
That article to me seemed to be nothing more than a bunch of sour grapes and gossip from anonymous sources. I'm not saying RIM is, in fact, a thriving titan of mobile technology on the cusp of taking over the world. What I am saying is that that article provided no more useful information about RIM than US Weekly has about the Celebrity Train Wreck of the Week.
I have a 2yr old blackberry, and I'll share a few product comments.
Message indicator light.
- pop ups are annoying, why Apple hasn't realized this, I don't know.
Blackberry messenger.
- as long as your contacts also use it, it's great.
Keyboard shortcuts.
- Designed for blackberry apps can be really fast to use. Ported apps often feel clunky.
I think the other features are pretty equivalent.
Native web browser sucks, third party browsers are better
App selection is narrow, but there are quite a few excellent apps that let me get things done.
Endomondo, poynt, honeydew
Camera is pretty good, I've seen better and worse on other phones
keyboard is nice, but I'd likely adapt to a touchscreen
Dumb things, lots of them
Arbitrary limits on email addresses for a contact, only 3 email address?
Can't set the default calendar
Some bugs just never get fixed, I don't think they care.
memory leaks & not enough memory,
Reboots are a normal part of usage, a reboot app is one of the most popular.
At the end, since I mostly just send sms & email, the keyboard and no-pop ups are great. But such trivial features are really not much of a competitive advantage.
You can tell the hallmark of a true RIM loyalist (bootlicker) is the "Mike is brilliant" mantra, and this is oft repeated throughout this article. And yet, this article is full of counter-examples of just HOW he isn't brilliant, how he completely and utterly missed "where things are going."
And this is the heart of the problem. RIM's executive team, especially Mike Lazaridis, is surrounded by a group of fawning yes-men who are afraid to tell Mike he's full of shit. It was true in the 90's to early 2000's when I worked there, and is apparently still very true now. Wanna know why the BlackBerry didn't have a touch screen until recently? Because Mike hates touch screens (as was the edict back in 2000). To say they missed the boat on this is an understatement.
From the Dept of Redundancy Dept.
Obvious usage is obvious.
For a corporate device, nothing beats the speed and efficiency with which you can use the BlackBerry. I have an Android device and a BlackBerry and I can still respond to email/text messages faster on the BlackBerry. I will give Mike the benefit of that one. It's battery life is also incredible and I do appreciate that feature. That much said, outside of the corporate/government arena, the BlackBerry is pretty well useless. The Android wins hands down for features of web browsing and social networking. I like both of the devices. RIM builds a device that is a workhorse, not full of bling. I think RIM could begin a comeback by not requiring carriers to use their NOC and opening the device up just a little bit.
If you're gonna give yourself a name that can refer to part of a toilet or an asshole, might as well make it stand for Research In the Market.
Sent from my Android.
Open source. Release BB OS as open source.
Probably the only solution that can render company viable.
There seems to be an intense eagerness on slashdot to predict RIM's demise. It smells like deliberate FUD, whether from a competitor or just self-flagellating Canadian doomsayers who no longer get their regular fix from staring into the abyss of Nortel.
They certainly have a great niche that they've cut out for themselves, the question is can they apply the same principles that allowed them to get there to a new product line so that they show some growth and are able to transform their original product when the time comes... such a simple notion, if you fail to plan...
It shouldn't have been all their products. It is and should always be an efficient product. They should have had the marketing that the windows phone has now. But they never really marketed it. The truth is business people are very slow to change so having a conservative product line for businesses was a good idea. But they should have still had an innovative and hip product line too. Quite frankly they should have been the first to jump on the android bandwagon. Not to replace blackberry but to try innovative things.
Google should sell off the RIM hardware side; the patents would still make the deal worthwhile. Having a software platform that is already trusted by business for employee phones would be a big win. I'm sure HTC and the others would love to own the hardware side.
After sitting in meetings with people fairly high up at RIM in Kitchener, I'm not surprised at all. The company seems full of empty suits whose job it is to Just Say No. Risk and innovation have no place there anymore. The number of times we had to have the SAME meeting again, just because they wanted to bring in a colleague from another department to the project, was staggering.
The company grew much too fast. They have a core of competent people, smothered by marketing.
G'night RIM.
The same phone over, and over, and over, and over.
BES.
Modern technology wins.
Seriously, a smart phone that can't properly work in the Enterprise without paying more money for a service provided by the manufacturer? You've got to be kidding me? RIM devices do nothing an Android device or iPhone can't do, and what they share in common is sub-standard on the Blackberry.
Games over fella's, close your doors, cut your losses and head on out of town.
See NMAtv's take on gadget envy. This is from Taiwan's biggest fast-turnaround animation house. (Apple fanboys will hate this.)
From a corporate perspective, a big advantage of the Blackberry is that, in corporate configurations, it has an encrypted link to the corporate servers, with the keys held only by the company, not the carrier. For a large number of business users, this is an essential feature. No device slaved to a carrier can be trusted in today's market.
... they would use this opportunity to tailor Meego to former BB users to fill the gap that will be left by RIM's death.
Your article, Mr Boy Genius, shows you're not qualified to be an editor.
And get a 2nd source, or give us a name. "One (disgruntled) former executive" is not a story, no matter how many times you repeat or rephrase the same worthless quote.
How to keep DOS from crashing... don't run any TSRs!
Once upon a time they were the only game in town. Now they aren't. The end.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Long time iPhone user here. A couple of comments:
Re: 1) This is my biggest beef with the iPhone. My last phone was a Treo 650, before that I had a couple of other Palm devices (which used the original Graffiti system). On any of those, either the keyboard based Treo or the Graffiti based devices, I could take notes just about as fast as I could write. With the iPhone... not so much. The soft keyboard sort of blows. But I wouldn't trade a bigger screen to get a real keyboard, I guess.
Re: 4) My experience with iPhone and ActiveSync has been that it Just Works. I didn't even require any assistance from our IT shop - I just pointed the iPhone to the OWA server, put in my details, and I had mail, calendar, etc. Easy. No idea about the security, etc, but it certainly couldn't be any easier to set up or use.
Also: I think your arguments are spot on for the person who's using their smartphone to do business stuff. But if you are doing other things with it, the iPhone has a lot to offer - just as an example, I like to fish, and I need to know what the tides are. There's an app for that. I also need to know sunrise/sunset times. There's an app for that. I'm watching my weight. There's an app for that. Etc, etc.
Why is the same crows that "Oh, Oh, the cloud is great, put stuff in the cloud" all the time now so AGAINST the mail processing of the Blackberry being done not on the device itself, but "in the cloud" somewhere?
Wouldn't that mean that Android and iOS is BEHIND Blackberry, since they need more power and network pipes from the device, not having so much of the processing done "in the Cloud" somewhere? Is it because RIM is "not as cool" as Apple and Google?
I like my Blackberry. I can read and write mails, and I can make calls. And the battery last about a week. And when I'm abroad for a few days the bill is a fraction of what colleagues with iDevices get.
I was in a meeting the other day, and one of the guys on the conference call wanted to know if we would ever get iPads for use in meetings and presentations and the like. I nearly laughed. Then one of the other guys in the room, says no but we are looking at PlayBooks. I nearly cried.
I do not see business moving to apple any time soon.
The only competitor in the business world I could possibly see are Windows phones. Only because they can use their huge advantage that everyone in buisness uses Microsoft products. However A) They would first have to build, or have built a phone that doesn't suck, and B) watch how they try to grab market share from RIM without getting anti-trust sued into oblivion by RIM.
RIM may just delegate and specialize in business products rather than consumer ones. That would be my advice. Do what you are good at. If at some point you develop some crazy new remarkable technology, then by all means jump back into the consumer market. Until then, stay out of the 800lb gorilla's way.
Come on! Everyone's talking about the BlackBerry as being good for "business" but nobody's talking about the elephant in the room: the "business" world is stupid!
Business is always focused on the wrong features, and stuck on consensus ideas and "best practices". Business is about being afraid of what will happen if you don't "control" your employees' phones. OMG maybe they will install Angry Birds!
Those of you who work in an office, look around. Look at your desk phone -- isn't it a piece of crap? Can you believe how badly-designed the interface is? Are you even allowed to set up your own speed dial? How about your furniture -- do you realize how expensive it all was? Would you make those choices with that budget?
The newsflash that's hitting the business world now, and why they are abandoning the BlackBerry, is that if a phone is designed to be usable the employees will be able to "manage" it themselves. "Cool" things like smooth scrolling, animations that communicate to the user where things came from and where they're going, etc are all more important than whether you can set your lame email signature policy from a central server.
The truth is that people used to think everything business did was "cool" and the hottest word in computing was "enterprise". No more, thank the stars.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Now I'll never get that RIM job :(
I'm proud to say I have no idea what Angry Birds is. And no, I'm not going to google it either...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The Bricklin was innovative not just in automotive design, but in financing too. Bricklin were selling vehicles at less than 1/3 the cost of production, soaking up government backing to create the impression of success. This was 30 years before Goldman et al. caught fire with their version of kite-based economics.
This is a fundamental question. I don't want my personal contacts, info, pictures and data on a company device. Further, it's none of their business who I call and connect with on my own time. They shouldn't be able to see those records.
At the same time, as an IT manager, I have big concerns about storing corporate info on personal devices that we don't control.
I personally don't want to carry around 2 different mobile phones, one for business and one for personal use.
The answer isn't a device that gives total sovereignty to my company. The answer is a way to partition the data that ends up on a phone as either belonging to the company or the holder of the device. A company should only be able to wipe out what's theirs, not the entire device.
As far as I know, no one has this completely figured out yet, certainly not RIM.
Sounds like a rant from many laid off employees. Not to mention that iPhone battery life is actually pretty well, so if we continue their line of thought that Apple got it right, well... looks like RIM got it right too.
Are profits increasing each quarter compared to same quarter last year? YES
Are the number of devices sold in each quarter increasing over previous quarter? YES
Are company revenues not tied to one single product or vertical? YES, in fact 40% over revenue in previous quarter came from licensing, not hardware sales
BlackBerry has 40% smartphone market share in 2009, but total smartphones in the US as a percentage of all cell phones was only 19%. So RIM had 40% of a 19% market.
Smartphones now account for 40% of all cell phones in the US. And RIM's share is down to 24.7%. If I was running a business selling smartphones, I'd prefer 24.7% of 40% over 40% of 19% everyday of the week.
My wife was for some reason hot for the Storm when it came out. I got one on a 2-for-1 deal, so basically free. Not worth it even at that price. Woof. What an utter piece of garbage. The main problem with it is that it had trouble being a phone. Seriously: It would often have trouble simply taking or making a call.
My phone would often ring once. Just one ring. That's apparently all it wanted to do sometimes. The last time it was my wife, and my pheon was just sitting there plugged in. I asked her about the call and she said it rang a few times and went to voice mail. My call log had it marked as a missed call. It happened fairly frequently that I'd get one or maybe two rings and then the call would go to voice mail.
If you were using an app (something besides the browser, since it couldn't actually view web pages and therefore couldn't be used) and you got a call, you had an even chance of having your phone lock up. You'd try to answer the call and would be greeted with a little spinning clock icon -- until you removed and replaced the battery.
Sometimes it'd lock up just because it wanted to. Again with the battery trick.
The radio could go from four bars to 5-20 seconds of no bars, effectively ending your call. You could be totally stationary when this happens, and it happened about every 5th call. I suspect this was the cause of the "1-2 rings then vmail" rings thing above. It seemed to have real trouble when someone tried to make it behave like a phone.
If your battery died, charging it and turning it on wouldn't turn the radios on. It'd stay unconnected until you manually "restore connections". If you forgot to do this, you're phone would appear to be fully functional but would never ring. How handy.
If your battery was very low and you plugged it in, you wouldn't be able to make or take a call. If you tried to make a call, you'd be greeted with the message "Battery too low to use radios". This is when it's plugged into the wall, and could suck up as much juice as it likes. If someone called you when the batteries are too low for radio use, then the call would go to voice mail.
There were many other nits and general inconveniences, but that's what sticks out. I replaced it with a droid phone and am kicking myself for trying to save a few bucks a month until my contract was up. I should have flushed that piece of shit within weeks of owning it.
Oh, and I should add: I never put a single, solitary app on it. And my wife's phone had the exact same troubles. It was poorly designed and/or badly manufactured. In either case, I'll never own a Blackberry again -- not even if one is given to me.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
I look forward to Apple buying the patents behind their battery technology from an empty shell of a company.
Agreed. The answer should be obvious though -- a phone that can run a VM which is a virtual phone serving those same business needs or even a dual machine physically partitioned which can share visual, audio and other I/O devices in the phone. Not hard to imagine and probably already suggested by others in other comments. Of course, the carriers would block this -- they want to be able to charge for anything that resembles an improvement or innovation.
Actually I like blackberries for their battery life, they low data usage and their security model. I understand how none of those things are hot neither cool with the myriads of iphone and android costumers, and I understand how carriers love data guzzling phones and end users love high res screens. I know people with iphones and atrixes and the alike and I still consider BB push mail superior. Sure I would like to play angry birds occasionally and a better web, browser but those things are not a deal breaker to me; but I know they are for the majority of people.
I'll buy a new phone within a few months and it will be a blackberry, the next one I'm not so sure as the devices are aging and gigahert-gigabyte (processor and ram) are becoming common place. I for one will recall the blackberry era with nostalgia.