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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.'"
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.
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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.
Blackberry could have survived as the business market's option. The security they once offered was unmatched.
But now we even see RIM migrating away from what little they are good at by giving away their keys to oppressive governments in order to continue doing business in that country. RIM is feeding itself by cutting off its own appendages.
I don't think Android is going to catch on in the business world. We just had a new vendor selection at my employer and IOS was chosen because the comfort level with security and malware on the Android platform is lower. (The nuances in that discussion don't matter, the fact is that the market sees IOS as safer than Android. Perception is reality)
It's unfortunate that RIM decided to commit corporate suicide because the market has lost something that was once good. Consumers now have fewer choices, and that's bad.
Nope, the decision was made solely in IT by the desktop/device/network arch staff.
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.
RIM can give away the BIS (Blackberry Internet Service - used by a non-corporate person in most cases) keys because those servers are operated by the carriers. BESs (Blackberry Enterprise Servers) are owned/operated by a company and RIM does NOT ever have the keys to give away. So the corporate customers using a BES are safe from the governments that have been the keys, Joe Blow on the street is not.
K Man
and iOS was found MORE secure?
Good luck with that...
I believe it. iOS might not be the best, but it's pretty good when you just want to get business done. It's easy to setup, easy to control, and Apple is pretty good at keeping people/Apps/permissions under control. Plus, every iPhone works pretty much the same regardless of model.
Some androids are easy to root, some are hard - some are easy to control, some are not. Some models are good, some aren't.
I personally like Android as a geek and and someone who isn't exactly pro-Apple - but I hated supporting Android and led the push for an easier iPhone/iPad environment. I'd never go back
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.
I will also add:
It was once said, "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM".
Today, nobody ever gets fired for choosing Apple.
I dont know anyone in business who has chosen Apple for the enterprise so I am not sure how that applies. Consumer devices that they personally own and bring in, yes. I can't think of another scenario where people recommend Apple for servers or clients when its actually purchased by the business.
Bull. The very fact that RIM CAN give away the keys to governments (or whoever they like) means their security wasn't very good.
You don't know what you are talking about.
They gave away the keys to BIS. That's the service they HOST THEMSELVES used mostly by individuals and small companies who don't want to host their own server. Of course they have the keys for it.
BES (blackberry enterprise server) is the enterprise service. Enterprises run their own BES on their own hardware under their own control. RIM doesn't touch it. RIM hasn't (and can't) give away the BES keys because the enterprise has them not RIM.
But complaining about RIM having the keys to BIS is as foolish as complaining google has access to the encryption keys to https://www.gmail.com/
Only when you're the one holding the keys to the garden...
and iOS was found MORE secure?
Good luck with that...
Elaborate. Elaborate precisely.
<necessary preemptive strike against slashdot fanbois>
And no. I'm not an iPhone fanboi. I'm actually an Android user.
</necessary preemptive strike against slashdot fanbois>
Geek, nerds, technocrats, whatever, they should be able to make statements like this immediately followed by a list comparing both platforms, followed by the most objective conclusion possible. Anything else is just hand-waving bull-crap more appropriate for technically-challenged marketing types than for the supposedly tech-oriented crowd that comes to these interweebz realms.
Can someone who is better at wordsmithing than I please come up with a meme that says we would all appreciate it if you only post when you actually know something about the subject?
Sorry to get off topic, but in the past year it seems that the people who post here are more armchair quarterbacks than actually in the field with something intelligent to add. Is this the Reddit crowd coming over here?
If you have something to add, please do so, but try to include some facts with the post instead of just "IOS is more secure" or "Good luck with that".
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you are shorter of breath and one day closer to death
I hate to post this again but I feel obliged to correct misinformation. The Apple Configurator implements security policies and restricts features and apps. No server required.
I believe it. iOS might not be the best, but it's pretty good when you just want to get business done.
iOS devices are one of the most problematic devices that we have to support. These are some of the problems we have had with them:
1. The web proxy server settings are all centralised on the device, which is a really good design. Unfortunately, many (most?) iOS apps seem to ignore them.
2. Many apps don't support authenticated web proxies.
3. Of the apps that do support authenticated web proxies, most of them do their own authentication (i.e. you open the browser and get asked to authenticate and can then browse without any more problems... but then you go to another app and have to auth again because the browser and the other app don't share the same authentication credential store. Then you open another app and have to auth *again*.
4. The iCloud stuff can't handle HTTP errors it didn't expect. If the iOS device tries to contact the iCloud servers and the web proxy returns a 407 (not authorised), the device just blindly tries again immediately (without supplying any authentication credentials). On networks where our customers have decided to severely restrict internet access (we supply systems to schools, who often put up very restrictive controls on their internet connections at certain times of the day), we frequently see the iOS devices hammering away at the proxy with repeated attempts to contact Apple's servers; we're talking hundreds of requests per second for hours on end - the batteries on these dumb devices can't last long with that kind of behaviour.
Notably, Apple seems to have a general habit of many of these things - much of their OS X software also has terrible support for authenticated web proxies, and iChat has a well known bug similar to (4) that results in it fighting with remote XMPP clients if they return a (legal) response it doesn't like - I tend to see constant network traffic totalling about 3Kbps per paid of fighting clients, and they do it even when not in a conversation.
Some models are good, some aren't.
Well, what is "good" often depends on what use you want to put it to. I can point at a lot of devices (running any of the OSes), which I regard as "not good", whilst other people will regard them as "good" because they happen to fit with their usage best. This is the benefit of choice, and is something you don't get with the iOS devices.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
The Blackberry system ranges from not very secure at all to almost as good as you could get making your own.
We talking BES or are we talking BIS?
BES
The base security model is as good as anything you can do rolling your own server using proprietary software. But the handset management and controls are unmatched. iphone or android + some linux server at the backend with SSL enabled isn't even in the same league. Sure they both do end-to-end email encryption, but that's about where the comparison ends. You cannot lock down and manage ios (or android) to anywhere near the same degree, unless your 'make your own' includes providing your own secure managed handset operating system... Android could be the basis for one but to my knowledge the 'community' has so far only focussed more on defeating carrier restrictions to open the platform up, not to deliver enhanced security and IT policy controls. You can't compare BB/BES to a theoretical open source handset OS that doesn't actually exist. Thus: BES is unmatched.
BIS
BIS is better than what you can accomplish with other handsets using a hosted 3rd party solution. The security is just as good as any other hosted solution -- but any two unrelated BIS users can communicate securely with no coordination.
If your a drug dealer, how do you communicate securely with your contacts? Do you setup a linux server with SSL and then setup accounts for all your customers and distributors?... And run a help desk to provide them support when they have trouble sending messages?
BIS gave them all that. Admittedly as a hosted service it was always known that RIM in Canada had the keys... and you had to trust them. And kudos to RIM for holding out as long as it did. And by making this a very public argument, RIM may ultimately have given keys to india, but at least the consumers aren't being decieved. Unlike say the secret NSA closet at your local ISP.