Certainly it's true that BB could still be doomed but commentary like yours is essentially the chatter of the Monday morning quarterback.
I remember when RIM was a smallish company operating mostly out of one office. I remember watching RIM soar and become huge. And I've spent several years watching them decline, the founders leave, and management floundering. I've known several people who worked there over the years.
Do I claim to be Warren Buffet and know exactly what will happen to them? Of course not.
Is it my opinion that they may never be able to pull themselves out of this slide? Yup, this is a similar pattern to when Nortel keeled over. Going from high flying, high priced and infallible, to tanking, shedding customers, assets and income is what I'm seeing.
In the words of Principal Skinner... "Prove me wrong children. Prove me wrong."
You believe RIM/BB will recover. That's OK. The executives do as well.
I don't have any financial interest in RIM/BB, you may or may not. In a few years, one of us will be right, and one of us will be wrong.
But my belief is that they're running out of the things which differentiated them, playing catch up to a market they helped create, and have been bleeding market share and revenues.
So, if I was laying money on the line in this, I'd not be betting on them to succeed.
And, at the end of the day, my "Monday morning quarterbacking" carries about as much meaning as your "Wednesday morning cheer leading". Two random, insignificant opinions.
The stuff they played a role in pioneering are now pretty much commodities. They rested on their laurels for way too long, and eventually got lapped by the rest of the market. Apple and Android have huge market shares compared to what BlackBerry still has.
They've been laying off people, closing buildings, and putting out products hardly anybody buys, and they've been saddled with ineffective management for years.
They're well on their way to becoming a footnote. Their founders all got rich and moved on.
What we're watching is the dying days of a once cool company.
Sad to see them go, but this is largely a mess of their own creation, even if they don't realize it.
I know people who owned their PlayBook tablet -- and, quite frankly, they were crap. There was nothing in the store, their Android support was a joke, and then they stopped giving updates for it. I'm betting most of the people who ever owned that tablet wouldn't ever own another product from them.
Well that's what every other industry is dealing with these days, why do these bullies think they deserve special treatment?
Because, their lobbyists have bought and paid for that special treatment.
It's quite simple really.
And your pointing out the whole thing about apps is key to it these days. See, Netflix came along and invented something. Like them or not, Apple did as well with its app store and iTunes. Now every ISP, along with the content owners who control them, can sell their own special subscription service to give privileged access to their own content, and starve out competitors.
They can do it in such a way as to enforce as much DRM as they want, have a captive audience for advertising, and ensure they get all the money.
They are now the old, established players playing "me too" with the ideas that other people generate, and applying it to their own networks to ensure you can only get it from them.
To them, owning your entire content consumption end to end and maintaining their monopolies and cartels is the key to ensuring executives continue to get blowjobs on yachts.
so classifying ISPs as telecoms isn't some disaster that ISPs have never dealt with before. It would basically just make things the way they used to be pre-RIAA litigation.
Well, in terms of their revenue stream and their ability to act like assholes... it would be a complete disaster.
Part of the problem is the ISPs are pretty much controlled by/part of the *AA cartel, and they will do anything they can to fight going back to the previous way. Because, right now, they control the money, the rules, the content, the lawsuits, and the FCC.
We all know this is BS. But we also know the FCC doesn't have much backbone.
They're not supposed to, not when you take a former cable and wireless lobbyist and put him in charge.
He's not there to have a backbone and "do the right thing" for us, he's there to ensure the cable companies get everything they want, all in the name of corporate profits.
And your senators and members of congress, they've probably also been bought off by the same companies to ensure they get what they want.
America stopped being a democracy (or a republic) long ago, and is entirely under the control of corporations. Sadly, some people view this as a good thing.
I simply don't believe the FCC has the desire (or the ability) to do anything which isn't entirely in the interests of the cable companies.
And, as I said elsewhere, for the cable companies to say this would stifle innovation is a crock -- because there isn't a damned thing the big ISPs have innovated in years.
What innovations have the major ISPs come up with lately?
Price gouging? Copying services developed by other people?
Sorry, but these clowns have been charging more for less for a long time, and failing to invest in their own infrastructure. They don't innovate. They sit on their piles of money and make promises they'll never keep about how awesome their internet is, and then fight to ensure their local monopolies are protected.
When they say this will stifle innovation, it sure can't be anything they're doing.
You should learn how to read. There was never a "no selling of used games policy" and there was never an "always-on internet requirement".
Perhaps you should learn how to use Google?
Because at various times, Microsoft has announced those were (or would be) requirements.
I can't blame you for being confused, having never read the actual articles.
And I can't blame you for being a tool who hasn't really been following this saga. But, nonetheless, I will.
Because you're clearly ill-informed about all of the things Microsoft has said, and then retracted about this console. And, I can assure you, BOTH of those things had been announced and then changed by them.
Well, given their track record of circulating rumors, then making announcements to deny the rumor, then making a contradictory announcement denying the previous announcement denying the rumor, then having more rumors, then having an announcement to confirm the rumor followed by an announcement to deny the previous announcement... you'll forgive us if we don't actually put any stock in what Microsoft says on the topic anymore.
Microsoft has changed their messaging on this product so many times as to make anything they say in the future something you have to assume is completely false.
Sorry, but no. They've been floundering on this all along, and mostly doing it in such a way that people aren't willing to invest in the game.
Starting from when they said there would be an always-on internet requirement (and then there wasn't), and then the whole "no selling of used games policy" (and then there wasn't), Microsoft has more or less annoyed. confused and alienated their potential user base.
Sure, some people will buy it no matter what.
But, for some of us, give us a gaming platform which doesn't need an internet connection, isn't providing an always on internet connected camera, and doesn't handcuff us to how you think we want to use it.
I don't want a gaming platform for Netflix, Hulu, Bing, Dong, Boing, or anything else. I'd also like to be able to play motion controlled games without an internet connection, because I'm not playing on-line games. Ever.
And, if you can't provide that to me, I don't want your product.
At this point, I see more value in buying a spare XBox 360 than even considering the XBone.
This is not too different from commercial aircraft.
Take a Boeing 747. They've been in production for almost 50 years, been through dozens of iterations and tweaks, man different variations, and quite possibly no two are exactly alike.
You essentially need to be able to get the full manual as it applies to any given aircraft, because over time there's been upgrades, changes, recalls, and everything else you can imagine.
When you have a few million parts flying in formation, making sure you know which specific parts are in which specific plane is a Very Important Task.
This means you can now assign people to do nothing but go through paper manuals page-by-page and verify that every page is present and at the correct revision.
And, compared to the cost of, say, an aircraft carrier of a submarine, the cost of that is pretty insignificant.
I need only point to child pornography materials to show that this is already happening
And we need only point out that it's being incompetently ran, has tons of false positives (and therefore false negatives), and frequently leads to stupid scenarios like sex education and other legitimate stuff being blocked while the stuff it's supposed to block still gets through.
These kinds of filters simply don't work at a technical level without blocking legitimate stuff.
Hell, at a company I used to work for their internet filter (Blue Coat or Blue Goat or something like that) routinely blocked things like yoga studios as varying degrees of totally stupid things. Because the people who run these things have terrible source data, don't check anything, and don't give a damn when they're wrong.
You would have to demonstrate that these things actually work 100% of the time to convince anybody that just because someone passes a law that the technology actually delivers as promised. Because, the reality is, the track records of these things is pretty lousy.
It gives the illusion of doing something, but it certainly isn't effective.
Never before has the agency or its predecessors taken steps to deliberately dump a large amount of highly concentrated fissile material in a landfill, an action that violates international standards and norms
If you are paying the $245,000 premium, I would think they would want to get the official astronaut status of 62 miles.
If I'm paying that much money, I expect to get laid in space and snort cocaine off the boobs of the flight attendants.
For most people, that's the price of a house.
So I fear most of us have little sympathy if these people are truly in space or not, and this purely boils down to "look at how much more money I have than you".
For the simple fact that there is a massive pre-existing stuff which doesn't have this.
It is either a gimmick, and won't catch on -- or it's going to require the entire infrastructure to be rebuilt around it, and won't catch on.
A lot of these futurist things are hypothetically feasible on a small scale. But on a really large scale it falls apart, because nobody could ever afford to do anything with it.
I predict it won't get much past the level of geo-caching... you can seek out a device which you can interact with, and that will be geeky and cool. But in terms of becoming widespread of practical, it's pure speculative "wouldn't it be cool if".
It sounds cool, but it will never happen in any meaningful way.
In essence - say you are interested in a $50K car. For a purchase, you make payments on a $50K loan. For a lease, you make payments on a $25K loan, and at then end you either buy the car for $25K, or return it.
I strongly suspect if you did the math you'd probably realizing you're paying more like $80K for that $50K car.
There's no way the lending institutions actually set it up in such a way as to be a wash.
I'm trying to come up with an explanation that makes realistic and consistent assumptions about the stupidity of the buying public, and still makes sense
For years, companies (and even some government entities) basically kept saying "can't afford something, no problem, finance it". Which is fundamentally what caused the meltdown in '08 -- too much borrowing, and financial institutions giving out credit like candy to people who couldn't pay it back.
People have been conditioned to believe that their wants are in fact needs.
Can't afford that $700 smart phone? No problem, get it on credit. Can't afford the new sofa for your house? No interest no payments. Can't afford that new house? We'll give you a mortgage anyway.
When your buying public doesn't really understand credit, and when everybody "needs" to have the latest and greatest thing, the lure of convenient monthly payments (which you may still not be able to afford) solves your problem.
If the average America has $15K in credit card debt, you seriously have to ask why people buy their phones on an extended contract?
Seriously, you're trying to find the answer to a far broader issue than just cell phones.
They've been talking about doing end-to-end encryption in the browser. That's incompatible with ad scanning, so this is one foot forward in that direction.
Is it really incompatible with ad-scanning?
If I'm end-to-end encrypted in my connection between my browser and Google, in the back end, Google still has everything in the clear don't they?
If I send to another Gmail user, they may also have end-to-end encryption between themselves and Google, but again, Google has everything in the clear.
Unless you're talking about end-to-end encryption starting from the sender all the way to the receiver, the notion that Google can't scan your emails and do ad choices seems naive.
If Google can display you your email without all of the encryption happening local to you, Google can still scan your email -- for ads or any other purposes.
I just don't see end-to-end encryption in the browser changing the fact that Google still gets all of the data in its unencrypted form.
And I don't see them building a system which encrypts the data from themselves so they can never see it. Because, they want to be able to scan it to sell ads.
The only DRM schemes that people tolerate are the ones that you don't see.
And those are few and far between.
For the most part, the content producers are making sure DRM is front and center, complicated, annoying, and extremely limiting in what you can do.
For instance, Ultraviolet -- first you sign up with Ultraviolet, then you sign up with the movie studio, and then you ask permission before you play the movie again, and if you're offline, you can't watch it because it can't call home to ask permission.
Sorry, but no. Ultraviolet is garbage, and I will never again try to use it, and if I have the choice of buying the movie with or without the Ultraviolet, I will buy it without -- Ultraviolet provides zero value for me.
It may be how the studios envision DRM, but for the consumer it's useless and intrusive.
So, does anyone have 'fond' memories of computer programming in the punched card era?
Well, maybe not punch cards, but I certainly remember printing out code onto 132 columns green bar paper in the lab so I could go away and review it for typos and changes I wanted to make.
Because 'keep bashing at the compiler until it runs' was way more time consuming and annoying than reviewing it on paper and identifying what you needed to be doing.
I've certainly hand-written out code while sitting in a coffee shop based on printouts of the code I was modifying.
So by your reasoning you should pay $1.00 for a song you will listen to on your home theater, but only $.50 for one you will listen to on your iPod?
And therein lies the problem.
I'm willing to pay $15-$20 for a CD I own, can take home and rip to MP3,and play on whatever damned device I so choose.
Fortunately, I live in a country where that's covered by fair use.
These guys just want to change the definition to "well, no, you haven't bought anything, you've licensed it, and we will dictate how and when you use it".
At which point, they'll never get another dime from me.
He's annoying. He's really annoying. He's bad comic relief with a fake Jamaican accent and an annoying voice.
I tried to watch Episode 1 with the wife once, and shortly after he appears on screen, she said "is he in the rest of the movie?" And when I told her, yes, he was, and was in the next two, she said "I can't watch this". She then walked out to leave me to watch it myself.
Jar-Jar creates a very strong reaction for a lot of people. There's a reason people have re-cut episode 1 without him in it.
Many people view Jar-Jar as a "jumped the shark" kind of character. And, while I can still watch it, I must confess to not really liking the character.
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I remember when RIM was a smallish company operating mostly out of one office. I remember watching RIM soar and become huge. And I've spent several years watching them decline, the founders leave, and management floundering. I've known several people who worked there over the years.
Do I claim to be Warren Buffet and know exactly what will happen to them? Of course not.
Is it my opinion that they may never be able to pull themselves out of this slide? Yup, this is a similar pattern to when Nortel keeled over. Going from high flying, high priced and infallible, to tanking, shedding customers, assets and income is what I'm seeing.
In the words of Principal Skinner ... "Prove me wrong children. Prove me wrong."
You believe RIM/BB will recover. That's OK. The executives do as well.
I don't have any financial interest in RIM/BB, you may or may not. In a few years, one of us will be right, and one of us will be wrong.
But my belief is that they're running out of the things which differentiated them, playing catch up to a market they helped create, and have been bleeding market share and revenues.
So, if I was laying money on the line in this, I'd not be betting on them to succeed.
And, at the end of the day, my "Monday morning quarterbacking" carries about as much meaning as your "Wednesday morning cheer leading". Two random, insignificant opinions.
RIM/BlackBerry has been in decline for years.
The stuff they played a role in pioneering are now pretty much commodities. They rested on their laurels for way too long, and eventually got lapped by the rest of the market. Apple and Android have huge market shares compared to what BlackBerry still has.
They've been laying off people, closing buildings, and putting out products hardly anybody buys, and they've been saddled with ineffective management for years.
They're well on their way to becoming a footnote. Their founders all got rich and moved on.
What we're watching is the dying days of a once cool company.
Sad to see them go, but this is largely a mess of their own creation, even if they don't realize it.
I know people who owned their PlayBook tablet -- and, quite frankly, they were crap. There was nothing in the store, their Android support was a joke, and then they stopped giving updates for it. I'm betting most of the people who ever owned that tablet wouldn't ever own another product from them.
Because, their lobbyists have bought and paid for that special treatment.
It's quite simple really.
And your pointing out the whole thing about apps is key to it these days. See, Netflix came along and invented something. Like them or not, Apple did as well with its app store and iTunes. Now every ISP, along with the content owners who control them, can sell their own special subscription service to give privileged access to their own content, and starve out competitors.
They can do it in such a way as to enforce as much DRM as they want, have a captive audience for advertising, and ensure they get all the money.
They are now the old, established players playing "me too" with the ideas that other people generate, and applying it to their own networks to ensure you can only get it from them.
To them, owning your entire content consumption end to end and maintaining their monopolies and cartels is the key to ensuring executives continue to get blowjobs on yachts.
Well, in terms of their revenue stream and their ability to act like assholes ... it would be a complete disaster.
Part of the problem is the ISPs are pretty much controlled by/part of the *AA cartel, and they will do anything they can to fight going back to the previous way. Because, right now, they control the money, the rules, the content, the lawsuits, and the FCC.
They're not supposed to, not when you take a former cable and wireless lobbyist and put him in charge.
He's not there to have a backbone and "do the right thing" for us, he's there to ensure the cable companies get everything they want, all in the name of corporate profits.
And your senators and members of congress, they've probably also been bought off by the same companies to ensure they get what they want.
America stopped being a democracy (or a republic) long ago, and is entirely under the control of corporations. Sadly, some people view this as a good thing.
I simply don't believe the FCC has the desire (or the ability) to do anything which isn't entirely in the interests of the cable companies.
And, as I said elsewhere, for the cable companies to say this would stifle innovation is a crock -- because there isn't a damned thing the big ISPs have innovated in years.
What innovations have the major ISPs come up with lately?
Price gouging? Copying services developed by other people?
Sorry, but these clowns have been charging more for less for a long time, and failing to invest in their own infrastructure. They don't innovate. They sit on their piles of money and make promises they'll never keep about how awesome their internet is, and then fight to ensure their local monopolies are protected.
When they say this will stifle innovation, it sure can't be anything they're doing.
Perhaps you should learn how to use Google?
Because at various times, Microsoft has announced those were (or would be) requirements.
And I can't blame you for being a tool who hasn't really been following this saga. But, nonetheless, I will.
Because you're clearly ill-informed about all of the things Microsoft has said, and then retracted about this console. And, I can assure you, BOTH of those things had been announced and then changed by them.
Well, given their track record of circulating rumors, then making announcements to deny the rumor, then making a contradictory announcement denying the previous announcement denying the rumor, then having more rumors, then having an announcement to confirm the rumor followed by an announcement to deny the previous announcement ... you'll forgive us if we don't actually put any stock in what Microsoft says on the topic anymore.
Microsoft has changed their messaging on this product so many times as to make anything they say in the future something you have to assume is completely false.
Sorry, but no. They've been floundering on this all along, and mostly doing it in such a way that people aren't willing to invest in the game.
Starting from when they said there would be an always-on internet requirement (and then there wasn't), and then the whole "no selling of used games policy" (and then there wasn't), Microsoft has more or less annoyed. confused and alienated their potential user base.
Sure, some people will buy it no matter what.
But, for some of us, give us a gaming platform which doesn't need an internet connection, isn't providing an always on internet connected camera, and doesn't handcuff us to how you think we want to use it.
I don't want a gaming platform for Netflix, Hulu, Bing, Dong, Boing, or anything else. I'd also like to be able to play motion controlled games without an internet connection, because I'm not playing on-line games. Ever.
And, if you can't provide that to me, I don't want your product.
At this point, I see more value in buying a spare XBox 360 than even considering the XBone.
This is not too different from commercial aircraft.
Take a Boeing 747. They've been in production for almost 50 years, been through dozens of iterations and tweaks, man different variations, and quite possibly no two are exactly alike.
You essentially need to be able to get the full manual as it applies to any given aircraft, because over time there's been upgrades, changes, recalls, and everything else you can imagine.
When you have a few million parts flying in formation, making sure you know which specific parts are in which specific plane is a Very Important Task.
And, compared to the cost of, say, an aircraft carrier of a submarine, the cost of that is pretty insignificant.
And we need only point out that it's being incompetently ran, has tons of false positives (and therefore false negatives), and frequently leads to stupid scenarios like sex education and other legitimate stuff being blocked while the stuff it's supposed to block still gets through.
These kinds of filters simply don't work at a technical level without blocking legitimate stuff.
Hell, at a company I used to work for their internet filter (Blue Coat or Blue Goat or something like that) routinely blocked things like yoga studios as varying degrees of totally stupid things. Because the people who run these things have terrible source data, don't check anything, and don't give a damn when they're wrong.
You would have to demonstrate that these things actually work 100% of the time to convince anybody that just because someone passes a law that the technology actually delivers as promised. Because, the reality is, the track records of these things is pretty lousy.
It gives the illusion of doing something, but it certainly isn't effective.
Hmmm ... so, why then does TFA say:
It sure doesn't read like they're paying $41K/person. It reads like they're paying $240K/person.
I'm not sure where you're drawing your conclusion from.
What could possibly go wrong?
If I'm paying that much money, I expect to get laid in space and snort cocaine off the boobs of the flight attendants.
For most people, that's the price of a house.
So I fear most of us have little sympathy if these people are truly in space or not, and this purely boils down to "look at how much more money I have than you".
Said the actress to the bishop. :-P
For the simple fact that there is a massive pre-existing stuff which doesn't have this.
It is either a gimmick, and won't catch on -- or it's going to require the entire infrastructure to be rebuilt around it, and won't catch on.
A lot of these futurist things are hypothetically feasible on a small scale. But on a really large scale it falls apart, because nobody could ever afford to do anything with it.
I predict it won't get much past the level of geo-caching ... you can seek out a device which you can interact with, and that will be geeky and cool. But in terms of becoming widespread of practical, it's pure speculative "wouldn't it be cool if".
It sounds cool, but it will never happen in any meaningful way.
I strongly suspect if you did the math you'd probably realizing you're paying more like $80K for that $50K car.
There's no way the lending institutions actually set it up in such a way as to be a wash.
For years, companies (and even some government entities) basically kept saying "can't afford something, no problem, finance it". Which is fundamentally what caused the meltdown in '08 -- too much borrowing, and financial institutions giving out credit like candy to people who couldn't pay it back.
People have been conditioned to believe that their wants are in fact needs.
Can't afford that $700 smart phone? No problem, get it on credit. Can't afford the new sofa for your house? No interest no payments. Can't afford that new house? We'll give you a mortgage anyway.
When your buying public doesn't really understand credit, and when everybody "needs" to have the latest and greatest thing, the lure of convenient monthly payments (which you may still not be able to afford) solves your problem.
If the average America has $15K in credit card debt, you seriously have to ask why people buy their phones on an extended contract?
Seriously, you're trying to find the answer to a far broader issue than just cell phones.
I'm pretty sure history moves forward, but people move backward.
Cookies, a 5th of scotch, an angry monkey, a pack or Marlboros, and a really fast car?
Or ... is that just me?
Is it really incompatible with ad-scanning?
If I'm end-to-end encrypted in my connection between my browser and Google, in the back end, Google still has everything in the clear don't they?
If I send to another Gmail user, they may also have end-to-end encryption between themselves and Google, but again, Google has everything in the clear.
Unless you're talking about end-to-end encryption starting from the sender all the way to the receiver, the notion that Google can't scan your emails and do ad choices seems naive.
If Google can display you your email without all of the encryption happening local to you, Google can still scan your email -- for ads or any other purposes.
I just don't see end-to-end encryption in the browser changing the fact that Google still gets all of the data in its unencrypted form.
And I don't see them building a system which encrypts the data from themselves so they can never see it. Because, they want to be able to scan it to sell ads.
And those are few and far between.
For the most part, the content producers are making sure DRM is front and center, complicated, annoying, and extremely limiting in what you can do.
For instance, Ultraviolet -- first you sign up with Ultraviolet, then you sign up with the movie studio, and then you ask permission before you play the movie again, and if you're offline, you can't watch it because it can't call home to ask permission.
Sorry, but no. Ultraviolet is garbage, and I will never again try to use it, and if I have the choice of buying the movie with or without the Ultraviolet, I will buy it without -- Ultraviolet provides zero value for me.
It may be how the studios envision DRM, but for the consumer it's useless and intrusive.
Well, maybe not punch cards, but I certainly remember printing out code onto 132 columns green bar paper in the lab so I could go away and review it for typos and changes I wanted to make.
Because 'keep bashing at the compiler until it runs' was way more time consuming and annoying than reviewing it on paper and identifying what you needed to be doing.
I've certainly hand-written out code while sitting in a coffee shop based on printouts of the code I was modifying.
And therein lies the problem.
I'm willing to pay $15-$20 for a CD I own, can take home and rip to MP3,and play on whatever damned device I so choose.
Fortunately, I live in a country where that's covered by fair use.
These guys just want to change the definition to "well, no, you haven't bought anything, you've licensed it, and we will dictate how and when you use it".
At which point, they'll never get another dime from me.
He's annoying. He's really annoying. He's bad comic relief with a fake Jamaican accent and an annoying voice.
I tried to watch Episode 1 with the wife once, and shortly after he appears on screen, she said "is he in the rest of the movie?" And when I told her, yes, he was, and was in the next two, she said "I can't watch this". She then walked out to leave me to watch it myself.
Jar-Jar creates a very strong reaction for a lot of people. There's a reason people have re-cut episode 1 without him in it.
Many people view Jar-Jar as a "jumped the shark" kind of character. And, while I can still watch it, I must confess to not really liking the character.