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CEOs of RIM Step Down
An anonymous reader writes "After two decades of leading the BlackBerry maker, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balisillie are stepping down from their roles as Co-CEOs at Canada's Research In Motion Limited. Thorsten Heins will now lead RIM as it attempts to beat the likes of Apple and Google."
it seem's the decision they made is about a year too late.
Perhaps they can get nice and healthy by not trying to compete.
But yes, the quote is a bit of a funny statement, and your response is funny. Perhaps a better way of putting all of this is that it would be more realistic and acceptable for RIM's goal to have a healthy market share alongside its rivals. To coexist, rather than beat or be beaten.
How many people understand the difference between pull and push email and how it affects them in the pocket? How many developers understand why Neutrino has advantages over iOS?
A serious marketing department would have launched the Playbook by giving them away to every Android developer who cared to ask for one. They would have spent money in product placement, developed a Curve phone optimised to work with the Playbook, and sold them as a single product so that people "got" the Bridge from day 1. Instead, they launched at far too high a price with a corporate advertisement that nobody understood. People saw the lack of native email as a downside, not seeing that with a BB phone you had one mobile connection that worked both devices. It was a classical launch by engineers who assumed that everybody was as clever as they were.
However, unlike HP, the tablet is pretty good, and there is still market share to lose. Their best bet is to spend marketing money outside the US in the emergent markets and Europe, since they cannot compete with Apple.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I guess that'll be the end of RIM. Last year it was REM. What's next? RAM? ROM?
Oh dear God, please don't let it be rum!
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
You talk about Elop like he is a good thing, when he is either a complete idiot or a Microsoft shill (I estimate the latter).
He was correct that Symbian was a difficult environment to develop to (my company gave it up for that reason), however Nokia had explicitly asked Symbian developers to hold on and they would provide a unified dev environment for all their platforms based on QT, so things were getting better. So, with one announcement he breaks the promise and alienates the thousands of Symbian developers. Developers are the only thing more important than consumers, by alienating them he most likely guaranteed Nokia will fail. He is probably confident that Windows developers will jump to Windows OS so he doesn't really need the traditional Nokia developers. He is probably wrong.
Then, his only problem with MeeGo (that he admitted - not being a Microsoft OS is more likely the true reason) is that at most Nokia would have one MeeGo device this year. Hey! Do you know which other company does not release more than one new device per year? Perhaps the one you are trying to go after? How do THEY do it? And of course, let's not mention that it was a lie - they had TWO devices to release, the N9 which was released in very small markets (Kazakhstan, Denmark etc lest someone might notice how good it is) and the N950 which was not sold but given to a few select MeeGo developers (you can't even find it on ebay at any price).
And have you seen the N9? Probably not since it was not sold in any major markets, but it is truly an awesome device mainly due to its OS. My company currently mainly works on iOS so I have all the Apple devices at home, but when my wife saw the N9 it was the only time she was impressed by a device. (Her words after trying out "hey, compared to your iphone this looks like it came from 2050!"). So while the N900 was the perfect geek tool, the N9 is the only device I have tried that is easier, more fun to use and much much more powerful than the iOS devices (sorry Android...).
So, yeah, while Symbian had to go, the developers should not have been scared away. They should have been first moved to MeeGo, which was the original plan with the QT platform being the common denominator, and all resources gone to MeeGo which (sadly, because it is stillborn) is the best current mobile OS, although the limited resources behind it kind of show up as some instability...
If you think I talked to much about Nokia, you should see how much I could say about RIM. However, current litigation prevents me from doing so, so commenting on RIM's outgoing "NIH" leaders or their successor will have to be deferred to a later time...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Your post shows EXACTLY the problem with RIM - the thinking that screen size, screen quality, browser features and games are unimportant for business users. Of course they are important - and we want our corporate email, calendar & address book AND a good browser, games & a nice screen.
The most telling part of your post that indicates you are a dinosaur is this line: "It stays on my belt out of the way, along with my personal phone ( a 5 year old dumb phone that can make calls and text), knife, flashlight and wahtever else I may be carrying." Be gone ye demon of the past - there is no place for you in this time!!