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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.
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.
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
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.
If you mean that crappy portrait mode keyboard, then there are android devices like that.
I hate them, and would much prefer a slide out keyboard of reasonable size but they exist.
Here is one example:
http://www.androidauthority.com/motorola-defy-pro-is-the-first-ruggedized-android-phone-with-a-physical-qwerty-keyboard-99976/
You will be sacrificing everything for that though, battery, screen, ram, a good SOC. These are only ever low end to midrange at best devices. Any BB user who is not lying to himself would be ecstatic at the upgrade though.
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.
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?
He's proof that ANYBODY can find a job, no skill required, even in this economy.
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.
Plus one way pagers are allowed into places that no cell phone would be allowed. like all tech, they have a place
Sheldon
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.
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.
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.
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.