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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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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]"
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.
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.