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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.
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.
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
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