Slashdot Mirror
RIM CEO Says Company 'Seriously' Considered Switch To Android
zacharye writes "RIM CEO Thorsten Heins's interview with the Telegraph on Thursday made headlines for his admission that the company can't keep up with Apple and Samsung without outside help. But there's another interesting nugget buried within the interview that didn't get quite as much attention: Heins says that RIM took a long, hard look at migrating to Android before deciding to plow forward with BlackBerry 10. Heins said, 'We took the conscious decision not to go Android. If you look at other suppliers’ ability to differentiate, there’s very little wiggle room. We looked at it seriously — but if you understand what the promise of BlackBerry is to its user base: it’s all about getting stuff done. Games, media, we have to be good at it, but we have to support those guys who are ahead of the game. Very little time to consume and enjoy content — if you stay true to that purpose you have to build on that basis. And if we want to serve that segment we can’t do it on a me-too approach.'"
Well, if it wants a small userbase of executives, it has to accept that small revenue stream comming from those people.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
You failed as CEO. Google gives you all apps for multimedia, so you don't have to do anything there. But they give you 0 enterprise apps, so that is what you could have done. Its not like corporations are going to pirate your apps and risk being sued.
This is the space left for where you admit your error and announce a switch to android.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The content of this space is why you're going out of business. We all understand that it would be very very hard to be competitive against samsung and HTC and so on. But blackberry is now next to irrelevant in the marketplace. And RIM needs a rapid change in direction. Hell, jumping on windows phone 8 is a better plan than clinging to blackberry 10.
The last thing the market needs is a choice between only 2 platforms for smartphones. Yes, I know that Windows Mobile is still out there as is Symbian, but because Microsoft took entirely too long to bring Windows Mobile 7 to market and Nokia really didn't push Symbian as hard as they could have (i.e getting a major player like HTC or Samsung to build Symbian based phones early in the game) they're both pretty much niche players now instead of the former powerhouse enterprise/business players they once were. At one point, when you said "Smartphone", you could only have been referring to a Blackberry, Palm, or Windows Mobile/PocketPC based phone with Symbian being the underdog. Even after June 29, 2007, when the iPhone was released, these were still considered to be true smartphones by many in business with the iPhone being the poseur.
Palm is gone, RIM is facing tough times, and Symbian is nearly extinct. Windows Mobile 7 is not even a part of the public consciousness even though there is still plenty of advertising for it. This is sad since there's plenty of enterprise users out there that don't need/want "Robot Unicorn Attack" or "iApp For More Stupidity" alongside their messaging services.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
FTFA, Heins remarks:
"there’s a very stable, slowly growing base of physical keyboard users and most of them are really highly ranked officers"
So, he points out that the keyboard users are the demographic with the least growth potential AND the least staying potential, and he thinks that's a positive?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." Feynman
It is possible, however, by rooting the Playbook, to open it up to full GAPPS capability, including the Google Play Store. RIMM needs to do this for BB10...and then they need to promote the hell out of this capability, saying, "BlackBerry runs all your favorite Android apps...and runs them better!" (Which is true; the QNX kernel of BB10 is far more efficient in an embedded environment than Android's Linux kernel is. This translates into increased battery life.) Karl Denninger has argued that this is the only way for RIMM to avoid complete irrelevance in the marketplace...and the company's performance since he wrote that piece in March seems to bear that out.
They could go further, too. One enterprising hacker has gotten (some) unmodified iOS apps to run on the Playbook. And it's perfectly legal, because the developer has just created his own implementations of relevant Apple APIs, and, under the ruling in Oracle v. Google, APIs are not copyrightable and Apple can't stop him. RIMM should acquire or license this technology and extend it to work with more iOS apps, and promote the hell out of this capability, too. Imagine being able to run virtually any popular smart phone app on one phone...with better battery life than either Android phones or the iPhone. (QNX beats the iOS Darwin kernel for efficiency, too.)
If RIMM does these two things, they could go from zero to hero in one fell swoop. If they fail to do either one...well, next stop is probably a bankruptcy court.
Be who you are...and be it in style!
If you're building a phone for executives ONLY, then make it a $1000 phone. These are people who drive 911's, M5's, Ferrari, or some other similarly high-end car. If these are the people willing to spend $300,000 for a top-of-the-line supercar, then they certainly should be willing to shell out $1 to 2 thousand for a phone. But it better be the best damn phone there is.
I mean, if you're paying 2k for a phone, not only should it make the iPhone look like a cheap toy, it should make almost all high-tech items look like cheap toys.
But the problem is that Apple, Samsung and HTC are all making really, really good hardware, and selling it for $200 -- a tenth of the cost. And for all of RIM's wizardry, they aren't going to beat Apple.
So, the executive who is paying enormous sums of money for a car is going to look at the Blackberry, then look at the iPhone, and still decide that the iPhone is the better product, even though it's cheaper.
RIM needs to get their act together and make some really smart decisions. Unfortunately, they are not.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
it's all GPL so you can use as much or as little of it as you want
You're a little off there. The kernel and other Linux bits are GPL. The Android stuff is under the Apache license.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
People talk about problems with android, and yet these problems are precisely where companies like RIM can differentiate themselves, by solving these problems.
The Palm Pre managed a touchscreen and a pretty decent keyboard. And a pretty decent OS, for that matter.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
Soon, the only reasonable asset they'll have left will be their patent portfolio...and the best way for one of the other players to acquire that will be to wait and buy it from the bankruptcy judge.
Be who you are...and be it in style!