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RIM CEO On What Went Wrong
AZA43 writes "After releasing some very ugly financial numbers in late June, BlackBerry-maker RIM went on a media blitz to downplay the significance of its latest earnings and counter increasingly negative media attention. ... But a new Q&A with BlackBerry chief Thorsten Heins offers a unique take on what exactly went wrong at RIM — Heins blames the company's downfall [partly] on LTE in the U.S. — and he actually seems genuine in his answers."
A peek into the mind of RIM's upper management.
Just thinking that Android had to put up with LTE and it did just fine. Maybe Blackberry's problem is user interface, tight control of apps, and now a crowded market with better products.
I always thought that the palm pilot was a great idea, but if it had phone functionality, it would be perfect. Blackberry never saw this idea too well. When Apple finally figured it out, Blackberry was dead man walking.
I miss the Karma Whores.
Its not being ready for LTE that kill them, it was the lack of modernizing the user interface and modern phones that killed them.
It's a pocket computer. -THAT's- the big shift that RIMM missed, and -is still missing-.
Nice summary of what the iPhone changed here: http://daringfireball.net/2012/07/iphone_disruption_five_years_in
"we missed on some innovation..."
"we weren't ready for it..."
"not being focused on the new, innovative technologies..."
and finally: "I would not say that we failed to innovate."
I just read RIM has sold one of their corporate jets in order to stay afloat. That's pretty desperate.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
RIM = Research In Motion
They simply sat down and rested on their laurels and forgot what their company name originally meant. No research -> No development -> No innovation .... open the barn door for a new player .... Apple.
So, if I understand the situation in bizzaro world correctly, it goes something like this:
Noble RIM, blindsided(because maintaining strong, mutually beneficial carrier partnerships isn't at all part of RIM's job given that they sell both in-house hardware and proprietary data backend services to carriers...) by the US' sudden uptick in LTE enthusiasm(the same one that was proceeded by a blizzard of advertising so relentless that even drooling morons 'knew' that they 'wanted 4G', even if they didn't know what that meant, and which was necessarily accompanied by a flurry of buildouts and upgraded hardware that the professional channel-watchers and trade rags would never have noticed) caused RIM to be horribly blindsided by the iPhone(which, incidentally, has been quite conservative about bumping connection technologies, with HSDPA only introduced on the 3GS and HSUPA exclusive to the 4S) and various Android devices, many of which were brutally smacked down by reviewers and customers for having early-adopted cell modems that their batteries and/or browsers couldn't cope with in order to sell 'zOMG 4G+++!@!!!" to the cluelesss.
This development, catching RIM entirely by surprise, and having no apparent effect on the relatively low-speed requirements of RIM's email/messaging/truly awful browser experience, thereby gutted RIM's position.
Also, the sky is purple, with green dots.
..... is the fact that they did not change what was needed to ensure business continuity.
When I was working there in April and May of last year I warned them for what would happen in case of an outage.
How the outage would last longer cause of the situation they had at that point and how to improve it.
Besides ensuring business continuity they would have also saved close to a million on personal inside their Dutch, belgium and french DC.
They said... yes you are right and no, we are not going to change it!
I left cause I did not want to be responsible and they had an outage.
Look at their stock and see when it plummeted to the ground and besides that I will give you all your personal space to decide.
Yeah! It's LTE's fault. Really, that's why iPhones are selling so badly oh wait! No, they are not selling badly at all!
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
The company was over confident, overly comfortable in the business space, and simply ignored the customer base... both current and potential. While touch screens were popping up all over the place they were still pushing their tiny physical keyboard. While the competition was bumping up processor speeds to up performance RIM simply slapped on a crude semi-touchscreen which was too big and cumbersome for the core of the device. And, they offered virtually NOTHING to the developer market to foster application creation or distribution. And, finally, they simply ignored their own infrastructure multiple times. In short, they were so confident that their position in the business space was so guaranteed that they turned a blind to everything important.
Either this CEO has no idea what he is talking about or does not want to address the elephant in the room. iPhone and Android support of ActiveSync is what did so much damage to RIM. Had BB supported that many people would have stuck with them just to avoid carrying around two devices, one for work one for play.
It also freed IT departments from dealing with restarting the phone, repushing servicebooks restarting the BES server and all the other hassle that went with BES. I know companies that moved to iPhone/Android and either fired or repurposed an full time employee that had been previously dedicated to BES.
What do you think would happen when you don't release a new phone in over a year.
RIM ignored the generic consumer in favor of selling their products in the business space. At first it worked because no other phone could do well in the business space and back when the only choices were Windows Mobile (the old, slow, unstable Windows Mobile) or BlackBerry many chose BlackBerry even if it wasn't the ideal smartphone, it was better than the competition. Then Apple released the iPhone which was consumer focused, no longer could RIM keep the consumers who just wanted a smartphone because there was a better option. Soon Android started appearing everywhere and iPhones got a whole lot more business friendly. All the while RIM was selling outdated hardware, an outdated UI, next to no developer support, and any time they tried to innovate it was a half-hearted attempt that failed (remember the storm?).
In a nutshell, why is RIM broke? Because no one wants to buy a BlackBerry because an iPhone/Android does the job a whole lot better.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I have to run Blackberry Enterprise Server. Its a complete pain in the ass in terms of support and main. Its years behind, and its clunky, chunky, and we end up going through endless workload and silly upgrade games. The handsets break if users look at them. I have to do warranty on them daily, and BB now quibble over each return, making the whole thing fail.
The handsets themselves - good email platform, crap at everything else. And the world _is_moving off being email platform centric.
Blackberry messenger is a bright point, but that should be broken out and made an application layer across all mobile devices. The same could well be said for the application layer and so on.
Their network is creaking, but is the one serious advantage that they have, but leverage poorly.
The playbook should have been a blackberry in a tablet form. Instead you needed a BB and as PB to get function. = Fail. Do not now how that ever, ever, ever passed QA and system testing.
If I were BB, I would go software only, and build my whole thing as a software/API/Network package, and build on that. Make the software a package available on all main platforms (Android, IOS, Others) and sell on data packages, and data transit using BB networks. And I'd radically overhaul BB enterprise server into something cleaner, better supported and easier to install, manage, run.
If they stay in the handset market, they need a killer phone/tablet BB 10 release, and they need to cut down handsets to one cheap cheerful, and one kickass model (curve/bold) and stop shipping masses of differening handsets, and make the things robust (the current models are not robust, and are inexusably so) And whatever tablet they ship needs to be a full BB.
(For the record, the playbook was so close to being very very good, and was wrecked by a simplistically small, but incredibly important part, that the whol board and playbook team need to have their heads banged together until they realise how stupid that fail was)
Not that anyone at BB listens anymore.
Nuff said.
We`re all equal
If he truly believes that LTE is the cause of their problems they really are sunk. LTE is happening now because iOS and Android are forcing change in how carriers have to supply data to consumers as a result of these devices' rich media capabilities. It is a virtuous (or vicious) circle that RIM was not part of. His enumeration of the Balckberry way (compression, security, etc.) indicates that RIM was happy to live within the restrictions dictated by carriers rather than focusing on what end customers really wanted. Starting with the original iPhone, everyone except RIM suddenly saw another way.
Breaking News: Technology surpassed by another Technology. Former Technology CEO Responds.
"I would not say that we failed to innovate." (Direct Quote)
> RIM is still a very innovative company. BlackBerry 10 will absolutely prove this.
Translation - we have been and are an innovative company, and let me point out this vaporware as my sole example of this.
I also like the part about their strong discipline with regard to product delays - on a product that's had numerous delays.
They were 10 years late to the touchscreen party, 5 years late to the functional web browser party, and they are still trying to show up to the UI party.
Surely it should be: Money, Al. Huge, heaving, throbbing piles of money, more money than you'll ever see in your entire life, more money than you can possibly imagine.
No matter how much of this festering dinosaur I have to carve off and throw to the dino-wolves, there will still be more than I can eat, and I'm going to gorge myself on its rotting corpse until we're down to the lips and asshole.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Physical QWERTY Keyboard. You are lying if you think otherwise - easily the fastest and most accurate way to type on any mobile device is the Blackberry keyboard. And good ol' Heinsy points that out. I would gladly switch to an android device if anyone would just make a device with a comparable physical keyboard.
Heins blames the company's downfall [partly] on LTE in the U.S
Do any customer decision makers make decisions based on LTE, or even know what LTE is beyond marketing? No.
What killed RIM was they were the first to market and became the corporate near-monopoly standard. They focused hard on F500 customers because thats the only place where the money was in the smartphone market. Until everyone and their brother bought a iphone, which tipped the overall market from being dominated by corporate to being dominated by hipsters buying iphone apps.
Its a balance thing. There are layers of markets. They focused super hard solely on the corporate sub-market of the greater smartphone market, in the early years that submarket was probably 99% of the total market so that was an excellent idea... at that time. Despite being a nearly monopoly player, they actually did a pretty good job almost outta the goodness of their heart. The problem, is years later, the individual submarket explosively grew to a large multiple of the subcorporate market, so they're now a small time player in the overall smartphone market, in a field of near natural monopoly where small time players simply go out of business.
If they could have released the iphone instead of apple... If they could have become the "android competitor equivalent" to iphone instead of the Mighty GOOG ... but they didn't... so bye bye.
A good /. car analogy would be there was recently a fad of obese landwhale SUVs which were so popular they tipped the whole automotive market toward SUVs. Then the fad ended. Whoops. Companies that didn't just tilt toward the SUV side but ran as fast as they could to the extreme while ignoring the rest of the market are toast.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Heins will likely join the list of people such as Jonathan Schwartz (Sun Microsystems) and whoever ran DEC at the end as the final CEO of a defunct technology company that one time was a major player. But RIM will likely outlast Nokia for whatever comfort that is worth.
RIM seems to be the Commodore of this decade. Good product, dedicated following, "killer management".
Belief is the currency of delusion.
IT does nothing.. and I mean NOTHING... without it being crammed down our throats by management, legal, or regulatory departments. We would rather get back to playing CoD or Warcraft and considering our pay has been on average slashed by half in the last 8 years, that's all the living we get any more.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
I have an idea. Seeing as how I'm the IT Manager at my company and we just switched from blackberries to android devices, maybe they should listen to me. I can't remotely manage android phones at all and certainly not all at once. That pisses me off and makes it so I can't do my job. Why did we switch? The Blackberry Enterprise Server was one giant, glitchy memory leak that caused me to constantly reboot my server. I believe that software is also no longer free. Hmmm. Maybe since they are the only mass remotely managed phone platform out there, they should just develop software that doesn't suck and release it for free then market it to businesses. Then I won't have to deal with rogue purchases and games and music and internet radio streaming and viruses like on our awesome new android devices. The market is wide open, they just need to get their heads out of their asses.
Posting anonymously, this is all second hand.
RIM has many problems, but a major problem at the moment is poor software design. For instance for BB native apps to talk to one another they write directly to memory, everything is shared. Basically everything has to be re-written for the new OS from scratch to bring it up to modern standards. The shared memory worked great in early models and made things run fast, but as the software got more complicated it slows development time. They are working as fast as they can to re-write everything, so if people wonder why they are so slow bringing out new products this is the major reason.
We only just recently turned in our pagers at work ( ! ) Meanwhile I own a Samsung Galaxy 2S (Sprint Epic Touch) which is better than 90% of the phones I see during the day. One concern is proprietary info on personal devices - most phones will play friendly with exchange servers, but companies don't want you to have that stuff on your personal device if you are fired or quit.
I think part of the reason isn't enterprises being "stuck in the past", but they are more cautious when deploying new systems and approving software for use.
The economy is another factor. The machine at your desk is already paid for.
New machines vs. someone salary - it's better to keep your job.
then how is the worlds most profitable cell phone company selling only 3G phones?
Security is important to just about every business. The idea that if the handset falls into inappropriate hands that all the email, all the contacts and all the notes are wide open and available.
The iPhone has some security but mostly it relies on two things: a very limited amount of email on the device itself and being able to remote wipe the device from the Exchange server. Which means the user has to (a) recognize the device is missing and (b) call IT real quick to get it wiped.
Blackberry has the edge on this with whole-device encryption which I do not believe exists on either iPhone or Android. This difference all by itself could have been used to RIM's advantage but they apparently missed this being significant.
One huge failing that I see is the handling of HTML email on the device. Blackberry chose - intentionally - to strip HTML email down and send it to the device to display in text-only form. For the purposes of storing hundreds, if not thousands of company emails on the device in 8GB (or less) it works. For the purposes of dealing with internal company email that some secretary has jazzed up with fancy stationary it works by throwing all that garbage away. Unfortunately, it doesn't work if the HTML in the email really has a purpose. Unfortunately, the answer to this is to go the iPhone/Android way and holding almost nothing on the device - which nobody ever explained to the business users.
Today, we have Angry Birds instead of security and everything that entails. Sure, the screen is bigger and in some cases more functional. But is this what business customers need? It is clearly what they want.
He's proof that ANYBODY can find a job, no skill required, even in this economy.
From TFA: "I think you will see the shrinkage of the BlackBerry market come to a halt. I think we've bottomed out on this one." - Thorston Heins
That is, IMHO, **extremely** optimistic! With new Android devices coming out seemingly daily and the new iPhone likely this fall, waiting for Q1 2013 for a new platform is a technological eternity. January is 7 months from now. In 7 months, how much more advanced will Android phones and the "new" iPhone be compared to BB10 devices in development? This is all assuming they don't miss the Q1 13 deadline, too.
Better than the first choice. Imagine calling out on your Dirty Sanchez Storm.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The market is doing what it does... it changes. It is the wet dream of every maker/vendor to think they "control the market" in some way. But before they know what hit them, them market changes direction and they are still moving in the same [now wrong] direction they were moving in when the market changed.
What could RIM do to save their business model? ADAPT.
Don't toss out those BES's. Don't write off those patents. Build an android phone and then build a blackberry inside of it. Make it a tight little ball that encrypts the file system of the VM it runs in... or better, add its own processor, dedicated to doing blackberry functions. This Real/VM could live inside of "The New Blackberry" which is an Android phone and gets updates and all that, but also comes with an app that enables the blackberry within to talk to the screen and other UI elements and, of course, can share the network.
They won't have to compromise security with this approach. The blackberry within will still be tight and nearly unbreakable. Plus it won't be burdened with 3rd party apps! It will just be plain, vanilla, predictable and stable. Want apps? Run them on the Android side.
If that is an an acronym for "Less Than Expected", he's nailed it.
In all seriousness, maybe RIM's problem is pride. They can't let go of their own picture of themselves as a prestige product in the pocket of CEOs. They are so focused on the enterprise they ignore the much wider entry level phone market. They could sell fewer phones for more $ to businesses, or they could flood the low end market such as pay as you go and no contract plans. You don't need to be innovative in that market, you need to be cost effective.
And you get 7 headstones. Seems fitting given the circumstances.
I wouldn't be so fast to knock pagers. Pagers have a SLA with a far higher level of service than say SMS on a cell phone! So in some areas pagers are still better!
Jack Tramiell was the end of (real) Atari. He left C= just as the Amiga was arriving and purchased Atari, created the ST line and then did a poor job supporting them. I don't see RIM putting out anything as cool as the Amiga.
He did not mention MAPS or SEARCH.
RIM is toast.
Plus one way pagers are allowed into places that no cell phone would be allowed. like all tech, they have a place
Sheldon
Simply orgasmic!
So, according to the CEO of RIM, the reason that Blackberries don't sell is that carriers don't want to sell phones that don't require big data plans. It's a good thing I didn't try bringing my new Brick phone to market. I mean, okay, technically it's just a brick with a pretend touchscreen, but it requires to data plan AT ALL.
Being right matters. Being genuine does not — in spiritual life certainly it does, in emotional life probably, but certainly not in ðe market.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
the fact they named the company after an unsavoury sexual practice.
Well, that could possibly explain why he's blaming LTE.
Maybe not LTE per-se, but faster networks played at part.
When Blackberry was a shining star, most of their core functionality centered around (comparatively) low-bandwidth textual data exchange. Email, BBIM. Sometimes they might pump a bigger chunk of data but overall nothing compared to media-laden webpages and youtube, etc. Apps generally weren't all that huge either.
Then you bring out Apple and Android. Web-browser, music store, media, and apps that can be 20+MB to download (plus a few hundred for "content" at times). If we had been stuck at 2G speeds then the best phone-browser would still have been a fairly irritating experience speed-wise. At 3G browsing is fine, but faster networks have enabled "smart" devices to become media hubs for video-conferencing, tethering, movies and live streaming.
There's a lot more than just "fast networks" at play, but it may have been a contributing factor. That said, it was also a predictable one that RIM should have been prepared for.
Long winded talk on LTE:
What also happened, in the U.S., was the drive to 4G started, and it got accelerated. Carriers were actually leapfrogging from what they wanted to do with 3G, like HSPA+. They leapfrogged and put a lot of investment into 4G LTE. I think we weren't ready for it. We were busy building our global portfolio. We had a slightly different view on when the LTE rollout would happen. And we made a decision to focus on the rest of the world, which led to some very high numbers, but then, consequently, led to us not being focused on the new, innovative technologies in the U.S. The U.S. regained the lead in mobile technology by doing this. So it was not just that the company was not getting it, it was really that the whole market in the country regained a technology lead in the world. That's a big step. ....
I would not say that we failed to innovate. RIM is still a very innovative company. BlackBerry 10 will absolutely prove this. I think that the reason is something else. We had a very, very successful recipe of what BlackBerry was all about. There were four main pillars: battery life; typing; security; and compression. Then there was a shift with LTE. With LTE it was important actually not to save network resources, it was important to load the networks, to sell data plans and sell data volume. We didn't miss on innovation. I think we missed on understanding, specifically in the U.S., that this trend was shifting, and that our positioning and our value proposition in the U.S. market was not following that trend shift.
And of course, you are also not reading about hte paradigm shift withn carriers if you did not read the interview.
WP7 has no LTE and it's doing just fine. Yup, just fine. Muuuhhahhahhahah
Lots of MBA speak and imaginary "what did we miss" reasons, but he still does not get the real reason: they are stuck with the "was cool 6 years ago" paradigm. Blackberry Storm is a move in the right direction, but they say it is an utter failure.
Is he the CEO? I would not bet on Blackberry making a comeback.
Unfortunately, they've fallen down in the corp environment too. Recent phones are less reliable than they were, BES's integration has become clunky (and don't get me started on running it under SUSE) and has a lot more competition, and the OS lacks the features/apps of the competitors.
However... that's not to say that they need to hit the general-consumer market along with everyone else. Despite great advances, there are still lots of gaps in corporate that Apple/Android haven't yet filled (and don't seem quite as interested in). Yes, there will be those that want them at work due to being "hip" devices, but the business class worldwide could still use a phone that is:
a) Reliable as a phone / communications device. Good audio. Strong signal. Phone-centric features etc
b) Lasts more than a few days on battery
c) Solid (and less breakable)
d) Convenient and quick for message (I personally *hate* on-screen keyboards for fast typing compared to a BB. Even with Swype it's cumbersome and error-prone. The Droid's snap-out keyboard was nice but seems to have faded away).
e) Secure (including safe from malware)
f) Integrates "personal device" well with "corporate tool". I believe Android has taken steps in this direction already in terms of setting aside spaces for "secure" data
g) Portable (doing away with carrier locks would be nice. Dual-SIM for those that do international business would be cool)
h) More useful for stuff like presentations, etc. Pushing your powerpoint from a phone to a large display perhaps? Hardware addons for projectors?
I worked on a product that had app for iOS, Android and BlackBerry. It took months to get a app approved for BlackBerry, much more than the iOS app store. We went through a couple of versions of Android and iOS, before RIM got around to approving our two-generations old version. Rather than give users an old and clunky version that no longer fitted the way we were doing things, we pulled the BlackBerry app and dropped BlackBerry support.
Verizon's decision to pursue LTE before it was actually ready was a master stroke in keeping the market fragmented and avoiding head to head competition and they even managed to screw up LTE so that they had their own special 700 Mhz band for LTE instead of the standard one. Other countries including Canada have multiple carriers sharing a set of frequencies for both HSPA/HSPA+ and LTE so why couldn't regulators in the US force direct competition on the same devices in the US?
Then there is the whole problem with Sprint trying to push WiMax as a competing standard to LTE and keep their old creaky CDMA for voice and texts.
Interestingly, in Canada the CDMA carriers decided to go with HSPA+ by November 2009 to be ready for the 2010 winter olympics held in Vancouver. Part of the impetuous for this was overwhelming popularity of the iPhone in Canada and the lack of Android options on CDMA for Canadian carriers to use. Most of the "super" phones on Android were either Verizon exclusives or already using the proprietary version of LTE on Verizon so the Canadian carriers had little choice but to go the HSPA+ route and directly compete head to head with the offspring of the old Rogers/AT&T partnership known as Rogers and Fido.
All of this back story led to different attitudes about phones and carriers. In Canada, the iPhone brought about a new view of phones and carriers with the phone becoming more important than the carrier you were on and carriers became "dumb pipes". In the US, it seems like people talk about their "phone bill" and not wanting manufacturers to add charges to that bill and that is the old school way it used to be in Canada. We Canadians now see carriers as a necessary evil for the phone we bought and want to use and not as the sole source of the "phone" we want. The carriers are seen as a utility rather than a provider of hardware in Canada and the increased direct competition has led to lower prices on data plans and flexible month to month tablet data plans.
In a round about way, I am saying that the RIM CEO is partially right that the LTE push was a problem but Apple avoided that by not courting Verizon and Sprint early in the game but instead focused on international expansion.
RIM's issues go deeper than the carrier fragmentation in the US. Their software stack and hardware are outdated and too dependent on BIS and BES.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
secure email on your cellphone with a really good interface was a really big deal in its time
them iPhone came along, shortly thereafter android, and took the next quantum leap
that's the whole story
and don't worry about it RIM: somewhere, some team is thinking up the next quantum leap, and android and iPhone will be left in the dustbin of history, just like all those blackberries
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If RIM wants to take back the smartphone market they should use their existing managed architecture for a new purpose: Smartphones for families that allow BES control and monitoring of children's phones by parents, combine this with making BB phones available for prepaid accounts (in addition allow people to buy their BB service separately (something really cheap, like 5 bucks a month or less) from their mobile and data so their @blackberry email, BB Messenger, server assisted web browser, etc. still work)
if they are able to capture the bottom end of the smartphone market they can use their best liked services (BB Messenger, push email) to start rolling up the rest of the market.
despite their weak performance at the top end of devices, compare a cheap blackberry to a cheap android, blackberry comes out way ahead on battery life, responsiveness, and UI, in addition their server assisted web browsing saves a lot of bandwidth for users with limited amounts of transfer (I am on my Bold 9700 all the time and rarely pass the 75% mark on my 200 megabyte plan)
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Blackberry, like all the phones that came before iPhone, was designed with the needs of the carrier first. The carriers need handsets to have a small data footprint so that lots of subscribers can be handled on a network at low cost to the carrier. Blackberries and their apps are still caught in the requirement to do something useful using microscopically small, closely controlled amounts of bandwidth.
What Apple did was totally break the bandwidth blockade by going to the carriers and saying "here is this shiny sleek gewgaw and you can only sell it if you also have data plans that are much cheaper than what you have now". And the miraculous thing was that the carriers caved.
Opening the bandwidth spigots meant that any idiot could make cool apps do things that the RIM guys had spent years optimizing to run with almost none. A BB can do usable email with 200 BPS, but who needs that when I have 250 KBits and can just do IMAP on my regular email provider?
That's when everything changed.
Its funny, I had a post last year (maybe 2?) where I came in on the side of "Pagers" for level of service and reliability.
Today, its the opposite, We are in the process of turning ours in because they are becoming LESS reliable then our phones. There are spots less then 5 miles from my hospital where they don't work because the pagers companies are turning off towers as fast as they can.
I fully expect "normal" pagers to be dead in 4-5 years (probably much less)
RIM CEO Thorsten Heins...
What also happened, in the U.S., was the drive to 4G started, and it got accelerated. Carriers were actually leapfrogging from what they wanted to do with 3G, like HSPA+. They leapfrogged and put a lot of investment into 4G LTE. I think we weren't ready for it. We were busy building our global portfolio. We had a slightly different view on when the LTE rollout would happen. And we made a decision to focus on the rest of the world, which led to some very high numbers, but then, consequently, led to us not being focused on the new, innovative technologies in the U.S. The U.S. regained the lead in mobile technology by doing this. So it was not just that the company was not getting it, it was really that the whole market in the country regained a technology lead in the world. That's a big step.
So if I can paraphrase: We were only ready for baby steps. We thought the USA was silly to take a big steps so fast. So instead we tried to finish our milk(-ing of previous investment). Now we want to take that step to keep from being left behind and we found out whoa... That's a big step.
Here's the short version...corporations used to do their own employee cell phone packaging and distribution. RIM had good tools for that. Then corporations told their employees to go buy their own phones, and employees with the money for a blackberry bought an iphone. People without the cash for a blackberry or iphone bought a cheap android phone. RIM kept making expensive phones that were excellent for an enterprise setup, which nobody needed anymore. RIM management then kept doing the same thing, rinse and repeat. Now it appears the shareholders have paid the management team to find a lot of reasons other than "We suddenly became irrelevant and didn't see it coming or do something about it once it had".
We only just recently turned in our pagers at work ( ! ) Meanwhile I own a Samsung Galaxy 2S (Sprint Epic Touch) which is better than 90% of the phones I see during the day. One concern is proprietary info on personal devices - most phones will play friendly with exchange servers, but companies don't want you to have that stuff on your personal device if you are fired or quit.
I think part of the reason isn't enterprises being "stuck in the past", but they are more cautious when deploying new systems and approving software for use.
The economy is another factor. The machine at your desk is already paid for.
New machines vs. someone salary - it's better to keep your job.
Most places (including ours) to connect a personal phone to the exchange network, they must also have remote wipe ability for exactly this reason. Even iPhones have this ability.
Symbian is real time too
And with a possibility for "run from ROM" or "execute in place"(that is, executables are not first loaded into ram but rather libraries and such are executed directly from the rom).
it doesn't really help with responsiveness though, it only helps you to shoehorn your phone stack to the same arm core as the os.
TH: "The delay of BlackBerry 10 is not because we added stuff to it. The delay is because our software groups were actually so successful in coding..."
If coding the a set set of features (so no feature creep) too quickly causes overall delays in product release, either hire slower programmers or insist on long weekends every week for everyone! You'll make the schedule AND save money on paychecks! :-)
They might come back.. maybe not pagers, but something a little less capable. I'm always amused when going into "secure" areas with signs posted saying no cameras allowed, but people in the area are using a variety of smartphones. A few incidents and phones without cameras might show up in some large corporations again. I'm not sure anybody even makes them anymore, someone must.
vi? Who's that?
was his nose always that big?
Dear RIM: BB is the last mobile device with an excellent keyboard at the same quality level of the legendary HP-41C calculator). Don't lose this iconic feature of Blackberry phones. Unless you create something truly outstanding that will be immediately acceptable to your existing loyal customer base, you will fail if you phase out the iconic keyboard. I'd rather have an Android than a keyboard-less BlackBerry.
This whole brouhaha is a red herring. He's like a talk show host: He's paid to have opinions and to express them vehemently, not to be right. Sometimes he's even like a lawyer, when he's asked to debate an issue's pro or con side, not to simply consider facts and offer a rational opinion.
It's kind of silly, like, oh, I don't know, ridiculing a marathon runner for not winning the race, when all he was trying to do was finish.
Whether it's good to publish pieces that are simply vitriol is another matter, but I guess he wouldn't get paid for it if they didn't sell--which controversy does.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
They use a Qualcomm Snapdragon single core chip which uses TZones in order to implement the moral equivalent of a hypervisor to run the baseband firmware on the same processor they use to run the UI.
Since there are four published exploits for the TZone model, letting people unlock the phones would let them have access to the baseband software, and through that, the ability to modify the SDR (Software Defined Radio) to operate outside of FCC/pick_your_country's_regulator spectrum.
Since the regulators have a gentleman's agreement to allow licensing of SDRs only as combined software/hardware blobs, this tends to piss them off and revoke licensing.
The newer Sony dual-core phones are permitted to be unlocked for developers because they avoid this vulnerability.
They might come back.. maybe not pagers, but something a little less capable.
I'm always amused when going into "secure" areas with signs posted saying no cameras allowed, but people in the area are using a variety of smartphones.
A few incidents and phones without cameras might show up in some large corporations again. I'm not sure anybody even makes them anymore, someone must.
A lot of phones are available with a camera delete option for corporate purchase.
RIM has to be the most ridiculously over-analyzed business failure in history. Pick up a Blackberry, use it for 5 minutes. Pick up an Android or iOS device and use it for 5 minutes. Blackberry is terrible, by comparison, and there are only so many stiffs on the planet to justify the "enterprise" features of Blackberry over the other fully capable, yet better designed devices. They simply tried to duplicate the 1990s Microsoft business model of selling a bunch of boring stuff at razor thin profit margins to business stiffs who don't care about anything but the bottom line price. Problem is, people expect more from business tools these days.
Here's a fun anecdote...circa 2008 all the program managers were toting around their Blackberries (the ones with the stupid scroll wheel). In a meeting and someone needs to check something on the Internet...bunch of dopey PMs whip out their Blackberries but none of them can successfully find/get to/access the web page we are trying to look at. I whip out my shiny new first gen iPhone and am on the site in 5 seconds. Also, for all it's supposed "enterprise functionality" same PMs would come to me on business trips to fill out our time cards (required daily by government contracts) because their "enterprise" Blackberries had problems reliably accessing the VPN to get to the timecard. They also couldn't get their email when they had VPN access issues. You know what connected flawlessly to our Exchange Server via VPN without any need to put an IT ticket in and be without a device for a week? Yeah, my iPhone (and my coworkers' Androids as well).
So yeah. Be first to market for enterprise level tools on a phone but then spend the rest of your existence being last to adopt things like "touch screens" and there ya go. Business failure.
The economy is another factor. The machine at your desk is already paid for.
Well, I left the typical crappy Dell Cube Farm style office a year ago, but I can tell you, the machine at your desk in this environment is being leased, not paid for. Dell's genius is not in making good products (because they generally don't), it's with locking in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of lease contracts with government entities.