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The (Big) Problem With RIM
An anonymous reader writes "Research in Motion, by all accounts, had a terrible week. But things might get even worse. The Canadian technology company posted dismal quarterly earnings numbers, missing revenue and sales targets, while margins continued to shrink. Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis conceded the PlayBook had been thwarted by a lack of apps and content, not necessarily by a weak platform. Like Apple with its iOS, and Microsoft with Windows, creating a successful platform will be dependent on the eco-system it supports, but RIM hasn't shown ability to foster that."
Speculation has begun as to whether or not RIM will wind up having a PlayBook firesale in the same vein as the TouchPad.
If anything, it's the PC market all over again...
You have Apple, the premium vendor providing a consistent platform...
You have Android like windows, the cheaper option but runs on vastly more hardware and anyone can put it on their hardware...
And then you have RIM and HP who represent the likes of Commodore and Atari, they also provide a consistent platform like Apple, but don't have the mindshare to attract third party developers.
Windows phone 7 would be a very poor choice for RIM at the moment, not only is the current version very much consumer oriented, but they would not really be able to provide much value-add on such a platform... Why buy RIM if you can go to any of the other windows phone 7 vendors? Android might be a better bet for them, as they can customise it heavily and run their own platform on top (or they could offer a pure software stack for use on other vendors phones). They could run their corporate email software in a sandbox isolated from the rest of the phone...
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I had a curve 8330 and predicted this years ago.
They had a funny policy of only releasing security fixes for their OS, meanwhile leaving out features that should have been in it from the beginning.
Simple things like being able to autosplit text messages, it couldn't do, simply capped you at 160 characters.
Or even being able to adjust the vibrate functionality on a text message notification to buzz once for half a second, had to buy an app for that. Shortest vibrate was 2x 1 second vibrations. Very annoying. Oh, and it couldn't vibrate and ring at the same time for a call. It would start the ringtone and in 5 seconds start the vibrate and kill the ringtone, then just continue vibrating for the duration of the call. Had to buy an app to fix that too.
I don't recall the rest of what they left out. I remember there were at least like 4 things that the OS desperately needed but that they wouldn't put in.
I believe their reasoning was "that way they'll buy the next phone hoping it's better with its newer OS", forgetting the part where if your current customer is annoyed with you, the last thing they're going to do is go buy something else from you. So then I got an android...
Like Palm, these people squandered a multi-year lead. They had a lock on a wonderful customer base and supplied the dominant smartphone-precursor device to the world, and failed to follow up on through an inability to execute. What happened to the original scrappy, farsighted RIM, that created the Blackberry platform to begin with? Gone - eaten up in the ugly process of becoming a large incumbent business. Now they live on inertia, and their management can't execute their way out of a paper bag. An old story, and a common one.
It has been obvious for many months that RIM was a dead letter - not just behind in the race but lapped many times by multiple competitors. I mean, the Playbook? Really? If you weren't short RIM, sue your broker.
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RIM's real problem - the reason there are no apps for their next-gen platform - is that they still haven't released a proper SDK for it AFAIK. They promised the ability to write native apps, Blackberry apps, and Android apps in such a way that they could be run on the Playbook, and to the best of my knowledge the Blackberry and Android layers still don't work and the Native SDK is still a month away in exactly the same way that fusion is 20 years away.
Unless things have changed very recently, the only way to make a Playbook application is in Adobe AIR which is really helpful if you're trying to port a C library from Android, Java code from Android, or port your old Blackberry application (if you were masochistic enough to write one).
Last I saw, a lot of the forum posts seemed to be along the lines of:
"Where can I get the NDK?"
"It's in private beta, uh, you can't have it."
"Oh. [disappears from the forum]"
From the "Firesale" article: "Keep in mind that these prices are in Canadian dollars" - check the exchange rate, 1USD buys you about 98 cents Canadian. The US dollar is now less valuable than the Canadian dollar. I got the impression the author is still assuming the opposite is true.
1) Perception: With RIM failing to release a touch screen device at most a few months after the iPhone, they were perceived as a dinosaur in making, especially by the young folks. Google did it with HTC and nobody can say it's been a liability to them.
2) Pride: Whenever one would ask them about the looming competition from iOS & Android, they would quickly dismiss those concerns with statements pointing to their 'solid' financial positions at the time. Little did they acknowledge that it would be a matter of time before iOS and Android started to 'eat their lunch', after-all these platforms were not static when it came to development.
3) Strategic vision, or the lack of it: A competent CEO would have [quietly] used the available Android code at the time to develop a 'mock device' for defensive purposes using internal resources. RIM did not. During times like these, they would simply 'out' a mock Android device and the market would probably play along.
4) Being Canadian: This characteristic is proving to be disadvantageous. The same thing happened to NORTEL, a once successful company in its field. Ever wondered why Canada is the only industrialized company without a car synonymous with it? Heck, even once communist Russia still has Lada.
On the face it your idea has merit, but I don't think RIM will do it, more to the point I'm sure they can do it and remain viable. RIM has always been Blackberry. They made their fortune off of being *the* real smartphone vendor that enterprise took seriously. They designed everything from the ground up and built a system that businesses were willing to pay big bucks for. Then the iPhone came out, and they sat there, sure that nothing could challenge their business dominance (who cares about consumer phones anyway?). Then Android came out and they still did nothing. Then iPhone got enterprise integration and they started to look a little worried and came out with a few new phones... Now two thirds of the people in my office (of a major multinational mind) have turned in their company issued Blackberries and use their personal iPhone or Android device.
What can they do by switching to Windows 7? Become another player fighting for the tiny little pieces of the pie? That won't support a company like RIM. This isn't HTC, they aren't used to surviving on razor thin hardware margins. They're used to naming their price and having big businesses beg them to sell more. In the unlikely event that they could even make the switch, it would be a much smaller and less important company on the other end. Until something major changes, their are exactly two winner in cell phones right now. Google and Apple. Google's partners are in a race to the bottom, and Microsoft hasn't had any significant success. At best MS will become a third "winner" with their partners fighting the same losing battle as Google's are fighting now.
Until a serious game changing event rolls along, the only real question in the phone market right now is whether Microsoft can carve out a niche of its own.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
If I had mod points, you'd get it. Until there was pressure from iOS and Android, both RIM and MS treated their mobile devs like crap. Which I find confusing, 'cos Apple also treats their iOS devs like crap (not much different from the way they treat their users, come to think of it :-)), but it seems that Apple is better at creating Stockholm Syndrome than RIM was.
If you were to group the most successful companies, you'd find that a healthy percentage of those companies rely on Stockholm Syndrome with both their customers and their partners to stay in business.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
it really sucks when the apps are only available for the big three - iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7.
I don't believe that's really the root problem here. That's a problem, but it's not *the* problem.
The *big* problem with RIM is that they stink. The hardware on the phones aren't bad, but almost everything else about them is. The interface-- well, can we just admit that Apple came along and ate everyone else's lunch in the cell phone industry? Can we just start by admitting that? The industry was stagnant and producing awful little phones with awful interfaces, and it's not until Apple showed that they were going to take over that everyone else responded by making better platforms. Android and Windows 7 are a response to Apple disrupting the entire industry, and somehow RIM failed to respond-- probably because they thought they were immune.
But now back to the interface, the blackberry interface is basically lipstick on a pig. On my blackberry, which is less than a year old, it feels like I'm running a 10 year old interface with a new skin. The graphics are smooth and there are kind of some fancy transitions and stuff; I'm not complaining about a lack of eye candy. I'm saying the design of the user interaction is extremely dated and stupid, and that was after they overhauled it.
The behind-the-scenes stuff stinks too. I support a lot of Blackberries, and they're constantly having random stupid problems where someone stops getting their mail or they get duplicates, and that's while using their touted BES stuff. It's junk. It breaks constantly. ActiveSync provides more stable results.
I'm not so sure about your suggestion to use Windows 7. It may be their best choice, but it's not a great choice. RIM is essentially headed down the same road as Palm at this point. They were huge, they sat on their hands and watched the world move on, they're probably going to try to become another hardware vendor with a commodity OS, but that makes them just another one of many hardware vendors with the same OS, and it's not clear they'll compete well. On top of that, it's not entirely clear to me that Windows phone 7 itself is doing very well. Sure, Microsoft will keep making it, but can RIM make money selling it?
The hour is later than you think, and RIM probably doesn't have any winning strategy here. Their best option may be to hope they can sell to someone who wants something about their intellectual property or their supply chain. But who would buy them? HP is out. I doubt Apple cares. I don't think Microsoft would be interested.
If I had a mod point, you'd get it for using Stockholm Syndrome in the content of Apple's products.
I ended up with a Playbook from winning a contest just about a year ago. I was super excited to get one -- all the specs were great and it seemed like a winning device. The conference I was at had only one, and they kept it behiend a glass case. They wouldn't let any of the devs touch it, but they handed out Playbook Emulators (software) that you could build apps against. Over the course of the next 4 months, the API changed soo many times, and the Emulator was so buggy that it was almost pointless to develop against it.
From that point, it was 6 months before I got the real device in the mail.
A lot of promises that made the device a best-seller still haven't materilized.
- It was said it was going to ship with the ability to run Android and old BBx Apps.
- It was said that devlopers could develop apps in native QNX. Such an SDK has still not been released, except for a few select partners (I've been a BB developer for YEARS, and thought I could make this list... I guess not).
- There were BB phones that were supposed to be released immediatly after the Playbook that ran QNX. This would allow devs to target one SDK / App development model for both phones and tablets. We have not seen anything about a new QNX phone yet.
- It was said that there would be a version that had GSM/CDMA capabilities coming... It's been bumped off their road map. You can either use WiFi, or tether to an existing BB phone.
- There is no 'smartphone' stuff in there. No Calendar, no Mail, nothing. You can tether to an existing BB phone and emulate some of those things, but if your phone is off, or out of range you loose those apps. Who pays hundreds of dollars and can't check your mail on a device!
- There has been a real lack of business apps. Still no SSH app, still no RDP app. No email, no word processor, etc. These are the things people will notice when they check out the devices in the store. If the developer eco-system wasn't supporting these types of apps, RIM should have whipped them up to fill in the gaps. They didn't, and they still don't exist.
- They've scared off most developers because of the way they run their program. You have to register your device with your program and download a developer 'token' that is only good for 30 days. Every 30 days you need to re-register your device to be able to deploy apps to it. Additionally, you have to bake those tokens into your app, which means that your apps can really only be tested for 30 day windows. To get your tokens approved it can take DAYS. Submitting stuff to the App World is a similar process as Apple, except you get more feedback when your apps get rejected.
Now, all that being said, hardware wise I think the device is REAL nice.. One of the best tablet screens I've ever encountered. I love the gestures (the borders of the device are touch sensitive, and most of the gestures you use with the device orgionate from there). The web browser is really solid, and the multi-tasking works very well. Because of the screen, it's one of the few devices I can read a full newspaper on without having a lot of strain on my eyes. The OS is also beautiful too -- and much better laid out than iOS or Android. The battery lasts about 8 hours of continious use, which is great for a device like that.
That being said -- I don't use it every day. I don't even use it every week because the lack of apps to do my work. At this point, it is a glorified web browser and that's about it. Give me the ability to do my day-to-day job (like I can on the iPad or Samsung tab), and it would be the device to carry around. But not until then.
Right. It made sense to buy the Touchpad at fire-sale prices because it was good hardware, had a good web browser, good email and some decent apps. On the other hand, the Playbook doesn't even have a built-in email application that doesn't require tethering to a Blackberry, meaning its pretty much useless as a couch device, and the apps just plain suck.
Forcing people to buy two devices instead of one was a very, very stupid approach
Your understanding is wrong. Playbook works just fine without a BlackBerry over WiFi. It has access to any web-based email system, just no on-device support for Email/Calendar at this point. Currently I believe that currently the PlayBook can use the WiFi hotspot features of an Android phone/iPhone for Internet access while you are away from a WiFi network. During the setup of a playbook, one of the first things you do is set up a WiFi network for it to pull in updates; after that it allows you to set up a bridge to a BlackBerry phone for email/calendar/bbm functionality.
For what it's worth; I do have a Playbook connected to a BlackBerry, and it does continue to work without the phone in range, I just don't have access to my corporate email/calendar/network resources.
How exactly is the GP wrong? PB has no way to go online without some other device to piggyback on. You still need to get another device to actually get online!.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
RIM's major problem is their management. Problems like a lack of apps and whatever other reason you want to put forth all come _after_ RIM's management failed the company. Specifically, their management's lack of vision and ego.
When Apple released the iPhone, the mobile market changed. You may love Apple or you may hate Apple but that doesn't matter - the fact that does matter is that Apple changed everything with the release of the iPhone. Simply look at the vast majority of mobile phones before the iPhone and then look at the vast majority of phones after the iPhone. Everything changed.
Most companies recognized what the iPhone meant to the mobile market and thus they changed. Whether it was to "be more like Apple" or simply because they recognized that Apple was on to something big, the design of phones radically shifted. Specifically, keyboards largely vanished and touch screens were in. Phone makers changed gears.
Except the RIM with the Blackberry.
While everyone else was scrambling to adjust to the new reality in the mobile market, RIM's management steadfastly refused to acknowledge and, more importantly, recognize that things had changed. While even the most casual observer could tell that everything had changed, RIM's management somehow seemed to miss the signs and thus they didn't shift gears. Not until very recently have they begrudgingly released phones that kinda, sorta look and function like a touchscreen phone but, by now, it's too late. Momentum is well and truly swung and, once you get a massive shift in momentum like that, it's virtually impossible to stop it.
RIM's management utterly failed their company. Their inability to adapt to a changing landscape; their inability to recognize that the landscape had changed or their unwillingness to admit that it had; their arrogance in believing that their established client base made them immune to changes in the market all has lead to this point. Their management is ill-equipped to run a mobile device maker because the market demands leadership that can recognize change when it happens and adapt to that change in a timely manner. And, to be clear, when I say "management" I'm largely look right at the very top.