Whenever I hear about MSFT, Nokia, or RIM struggling to catch up to the incredible lead that Apple has, I remember back in 2007 when Steve Jobs said basically "the iPhone is at least 3 years ahead of everything else in the market."
It took about 3 years for most of the competition to catch up to what the iPhone launched as. Microsoft kept trying to ride the WP 6 train hoping the iPhone was going to flop and not become the next iPod. Eventually they had to do a major rewrite which put them a few years behind of iPhone. Oops. Blackberry Storm and Torch are both still below par and not even competitive against Android devices, let alone iPhone. Nokia never caught up at all with the iPhone.
Similar story is playing out with the iPad. Android is catching up on hardware, but not software ecosystem. Maybe that will be different in a year, but the market could certainly shape up to be more like the iPod dominance of music players than the iPhone/Android dominance of phones. Windows 8 will launch when? 2 or 3 years after the iPad. Sound familiar? Blackberry Playbook is out, but that's such a mess it's not worth discussing.
Steve Jobs was right back in 2007 and most of the market is still 2-3 years behind where Apple is.
The root of the problem lies in the OS and their SDK. For a while BlackBerrys were the best platform to develop for. Symbian, pain is the ass. JavaME, even worse. WM6 was a little bit better, but it still was a pretty bad WinCE fork, with all the glory of the Win32 Api. Now along comes Apple in 2008 with an extensively documented SDK, that includes all kind of high-level APIs, and an IDE with tools, that actually work.
This has never been the case in mobile development before. Although ObjC was a stranger to most people back then, it's certainly something you can learn and work with.
Next comes Google, again massive APIs, everything perfectly documented, tools that work. On top of that, the language of choice is Java and the former best platform for developer, Blackberrys, just looks severely outdated in comparison to Android.
RIM's root APIs basically didn't change since the age of monochrome-displayed Blackberrys. Over time they patched in support for colored displays, then 2-way navigation wheel, then 4-way navigation ball, and later on touchscreens. The reason the BlackBerry Storm has an extra 'click' in the screen (you could tap the screen to highlight something e.g. a button and then press the whole screen down, like a mouse button, to actually click the button), is that the whole User Interface APIs relied on onFocus and onClick events, something that comes from the times of the 2-way navigation wheel and is fundamentally incompatible with the way touch devices work.
Now in retrospect its easy to say they should have rewritten everything a couple years ago and started with a new OS from scratch, but that's a big risk to take and generally not how big companies work.
Anyway the new generation of modern smartphone OS'es is now in full swing and RIM OS is pretty much dead. Microsoft knows that, they started from scratch, Nokia knows that, they gave up on Symbian. RIM? They probably can hold on to business customers for some years, but recovery is gonna be hard.
There are many decisions Jobs and company have made that for me has made Android look more attractive. I currently own an iPhone and have so for over a year now, but there are things I want it to do that it can not while Android can. When my contract is up Im getting a Nexus or EVO.
I want to enjoy flash, i want to truly run apps in the background, i want the ability to have voice search on home screen via click of a button, i dont want to have to go through sync process when i connect iPhone ( i dont want to find out how to stop sync), I want Google's awesome built in GPS and I want the ability for more customization.
Ive enjoyed my iPhone but playing with girlfriend's Droid X2 and her prior Droid Incredible just showed me Im on the wrong platform. Though Apple's customer service is almost unmatched - will miss that.
They have hordes of cash now but to me with what I mentioned above maybe Apple is truly headed down and destined to repeat it's own history?
There is a second element in the NOKIA/RIM/MSFT/AAPL/GOOG that I wish someone like Asymco or JD Powers would track - and that is "Consumer perceived value 1 year later" - I realize WP7 hasn't been out for a year yet, but most of the other platforms (is Nokia still a platform?) have, and it would be interesting to see if people still value their smart phone after the initial wow factor has worn off, or whether they have seen a decreased, or increased value.
It's complex - because a lot of factors come into play. iPhone has better battery life (as long as you don't touch the GPS), Android has more freedom, WP7 has a nice engaging interface, RIM is unbeatable in messaging, etc...
But, it would be nice to see what people think of their smart phones a year after purchase, and add _that_ into the unweighted graph [1] of Profit/Market Share/Revenue Share that Asymco does.
I guess, to some degree, that's represented in a "Will you buy the same model during the next refresh" - and the answer to that question might be a good proxy for "How happy are you, one year later, with the value you receive from your smart phone"
That, too me, will be a key indicator of which of the mobile providers will prevail.
Apple probably has the most experience creating top-notch interfaces of any company in the world. Added to this their experience creating leading edge consumer hardware, and how can Google or Microsoft, even less so Samsung, Motorola, RIM, hope to compete? Apple has at least one big advantage over any company I can think of. They do it all, and do it better than everyone else.
Apple is really hitting their stride, after almost 30 years, and the state of the market is perfect for a company just like them. With how closed they are, though, I don't think they'll dominate. That seems to be fine with Apple, though - they're not after the next Windows.
I think the momentum behind Android, and the wide variety of companies using it, is going to keep it at the #1 mobile OS spot. The future of the ones other than Android and iOS doesn't look great for phones. Tablet are still so new, that it's difficult to predict what will happen.
I was discussing the same thing with friends. It's impressive how a company have three years ahead of competition, more thinking that the money is not the problem.
In other words, it seems like even if MSFT, Nokia, RIM and Google have virtually infinite money they can't catch up. That's a real competitive advantage for Apple.
1. RIM needs to to stop trying to be Apple. I'm not saying ditch the touch screen completely, but they need to stop following so closely in Apple's product development footsteps.
2. RIM needs to stop being shy about where they manufacture their products. They need to bring manufacturing completely (as in 100%) in to North America and advertise the heck out of that. Apple relies on inexpensive, cheap labor - hit them in the marketing cahones.
3. RIM needs to build a profitable developer marketplace. The only reason anyone cares about iOS Apps is because there is a chance small developers can make a lot of money developing. RIM needs to create a system where developers can easily earn money. From in-app purchases, to a robust in-app ad serving platform to flexible purchasing options, RIM needs to take a giant step back and let a developer develop any app they want and charge any way they want.
4. RIM needs to remember that it is first and foremost, a hardware company. They've never been good at making pretty software that works well. Palm, Handspring, HP, Microsoft, and Apple have all at one time or another beat RIM time and again with software - but rarely hardware. Mobile Internet Devices don't need to be complicated or even revolutionary - they just need to be sturdy, refined and fashionable. Forget about saving money on Curve keyboards, forget about trying to breakthrough some crappy "clicking screen", build really great hardware, even if that hardware doesn't conform to the latest trends.
5. Last, RIM needs to kick cellular providers in the butt. They need to step up where Apple hasn't and make their consumer level data plans inexpensive, open and user friendly.
Some great points here. I went to school in Waterloo (where RIM is) and worked for 4 months in product design at Apple, so I am pretty aware of the differences between the two companies. Here are my thoughts on your points:
1) Very true. Apple is anal about the smallest details, RIM isn't. RIM has too many products in parallel development to dedicate the kind of resources they would need to match Apple. Just can't happen. Just accept it and come with your own style.
2) I absolutely love this. RIM does have a lot of manufacturing done overseas, but they have a very modern manufacturing facility right in Waterloo. Bring it all here and hype that up. It might flop, but it's a ballsy move that people would appreciate.
3) I am not sure if this is the case anymore, but for a while there, BlackBerry's were being shipped without App World on them. Wtf!
4) I disagree here. Their acquisition of QNX was brilliant. Use the playbook and you realize that it's an entirely different operating system than OS6. I think it could be very successful on their phones.
5) Interesting. Would help to become the low-cost smartphone while keeping margins relatively high.
In my opinion, it all comes down to how well QNX can create a compelling smartphone operating system. Do it well, and RIM will do just fine capitalizing on their legacy customers and getting those who want a keyboard. Screw it up, we might be looking at the next Palm.
Do people actually care about where the product is manufactured? I don't, as long as they're not using slave labor etc; I actually think outsourcing improves the standard of living around the world and provides me a better product at a lower price.
1. Agree to a degree they already doing it on Playbook by taking good stuff from WebOS whenever I use iPad I wish I had PB ui on it.
2.It would take a very good marketer to pull this off and make real money. Not sure about it.
3. You can make money on AppWorld and competition is not like on iOS. They have payment and ad api. They also now introducing BBM sdk, which could be a massive money maker for some apps that can integrate with it.
4. I do not think they can do this, huge part of their brand is software (security BBM etc) QNX is what will either save them or kill them I think.
5. Not sure, my plan costs me $35 cdn and its unlimited sms, 5gb of data etc (go WIND!)
QNX is the key, I just hope we do not have to code in flash to make stuff for it.
This si an exciting time to be a dev in mobile I think both RIM and MS can really surprise many people who think this is all over. US is farm from the only market, people here tend to forget that.
1. As they did before(they tried to follow their own path but market disagreed with them), so the can continue losing market share even faster...
2. So people that is not North American, like Europeans, Japanese, Chinese and South Americans have more reasons to not choose it. Do you honestly think that you(Americans) are the center of the world?
3.4.Yes, they have to.
5. They can't kick their customers!! Remember that RIM does not have a direct sales channel as Apple has, they need cellular providers. It is terrible expensive to have it(you need billions of dollars in inventory).
1. Agreed. I was going to switch to them when the Torch came out (love my physical keyboard), but what a failure that was.
5. So much of this, but I doubt they have enough power to do this anymore. Case in point: BESX (the free enterprise server). When BESX came out everyone was happy until Verizon were assholes and still required some nonsense fees that BESX was supposed to make free.
I don't know how much things have changed since then -- it's been about a year now -- but I doubt its any different now.
Blackberry became the big name in smartphones by making emailing dead simple. In the middle part of last decade, that's what mattered. People were mostly used to mobile phones for making calls, the occasional text message, and maybe a stupid game or two.
When RIM made emailing from the road a very simple process, and created an enterprise-class system for businesses, their brand hit its peak. When they tried to leverage themselves into the consumer market, they did have some initial success. But when they were starting to actually jump into the pond--after dipping their toes in--Apple came in and sucker punched the entire market in January 2007.
All of a sudden, big players like RIM were behind the curve, figuratively and, for RIM, literally.
They essentially had a 6-month period to get phones that could compete with Apple and nobody really did a good job. The first iPhone was very vulnerable--no native apps, EDGE, and big price tag--but by the time anyone could offer an iPhone-like experience, Apple had the 3G, native apps, and a lower price tag.
RIM seemed to simply take too long to close their gaps. Their first touchscreen had a hugely misplaced marketing campaign. When RIM released the Storm, they made their SureTouch (or whatever it's called) screen a huge focus. Differentiation is certainly a product strategy, but it seemed like a fairly ridiculous thing to try to base your marketing around. At the time, a lot of people were weary of touchscreens vs. physical keyboards, but the added "value" of the SureTouch didn't come close to a physical keyboard and hindered the use of the touchscreen.
It seems like RIM's major problems were with product design / development, coupled with bad marketing. They controlled the business market, which helped drive the consumer market, and then lost control of it.
I think you hit the nail on the head with email. So much is about perception and not technology. When people think about Blackberry they think about email and business. That's it. They don't imagine awesome fun games or music players or videos or cameras even though the blackberry (in theory) has all those.
Nokia has a similar problem, I think. When people imagine Nokia they imagine a 1990s era dumb phone, or at best a crippled feature phone. It doesn't matter what else Nokia does, they are defined that way in the consumer mind.
When people think of Android they think of Google, super smart things like mapping, searching, voice recognition, translation, calendaring, etc. They feel like they are on the edge, living in the future.
And when they think of the iPhone they think of the slick, super smooth experience, the games and multimedia features, apps.
It doesn't really matter what any of these companies do, they'll continue to be defined this way and only Android & iPhone have a truly positive image in this new world. WP7 is hard to define and I'm divided on whether Nokia is good or bad because when Nokia becomes an influence on the brand it may well act like a boat anchor rather than the winch MS obviously wants it to be.
RIMM is one of the few companies that can actual compete based on it's hardware specs, as opposed to it's software. People who use blackberry's love their keyboards. They also love their email functionality. They should have switched over to Android based devices running on their hardware with their email client, with BBM thrown in. It could have been a killer device with a ton of apps available from the get go.
This really could have, and should have, been done a while ago, but it's seems like Mike Lazardis is on some kind of a ego trip.
Funny you should say that. I remember when reading the interview with Mike Lazardis in "Founders at Work" it struck me how much he boasted about himself and his pals being cool, smart, and innovative. It was somewhat off-putting, and also surprising how someone with so little humility and self-awareness made it so far.
> This really could have, and should have, been done a while ago, but it's seems like Mike Lazardis is on some kind of a ego trip.
No, he's just doing what any good CEO of a large enterprise should do - increase shareholder value. They've pushed strong numbers from 2007 and have only recently started to plummet. (for now obvious reasons) Innovator's dilemma at its finest.
Could you elaborate on this some more, particularly the email client?
I had a Blackberry 8830 a few years ago and, even at that time, I thought it was a barebones POS. The email client was pretty unremarkable, as I recall.
I'm not really a fan of RIM, but the Playbook gave me a very good impression when I first played with it at Best Buy. It isn't an iPad, but it was far more pleasant to use than any of the Android tablets currently on the market.
The decision to ship it without email or calendaring, though... I don't know what they were thinking.
Phrases like this make me feel a little bit queasy:
Cost Optimization Program:
The company also announced that it will begin a program to streamline operations across the organization,
which will include a headcount reduction. This realignment will be focused on taking out redundancies
and a reallocation of resources to allow us to focus on the areas that offer the highest growth opportunities
and align with RIM strategic objectives, such as accelerating new product introductions.
Sometimes PR speech is directly symptomatic of executives' thinking. They talk like this because they think like this - i.e. vague, non-committal, detached abstract concepts that sound professional but are ultimately flat, uninspired and purely reactionary.
I'm only saying this because I'm still bitter from my last employment where this kind of business talk was routinely used to fill the void where management's vision was supposed to be. It really begins to grate.
"RIM's real problems center around two big issues: its market is saturating, and it seems to have lost the ability to create great products. This is a classic problem that eventually faces most successful computer platforms. The danger is not that RIM is about to collapse, but that it'll drift into in a situation where it can't afford the investments needed to succeed in the future. It's very easy for a company to accidentally cross that line, and very hard to get back across it."
> "and it seems to have lost the ability to create great products"
I disagree with this part. RIM's products are just as good/bad as they've always been - the problem is that Apple came in and raised the bar across the board, and Google came in and did it some more.
RIM is creating early-2000s product in a landscape that has been completely reshaped by iOS and Android.
The problem is RIM still thinks it's making great products - the Blackberry phones. They think this because countries that have heard of the Blackberry brand for years, but not so much about "Android" or even iPhone, have started buying a lot of Blackberry phones lately.
What RIM didn't realize is that this was happening because of their global inertia, not because their products are still very competitive with iPhones and high-end Android phones. After all, there are still a lot of people who keep buying high-end Nokia phones rather than iPhones or Android phones.
It's all about inertia. They experience growth in new markets (for now - just a matter of time) but their core markets are fading away. This could blind them for years from seeing that they will be in trouble eventually, because overall they were still making a lot of money until more recently.
The next time something like the iPhone launch happens, I'm going to listen to the voice in the back of my head telling me to short the competition over the next three years...
When the iPhone was announced, RIM was trading at just under $50/share. It's now trading at ~$35, its lowest point since. To realize that gain, you would have had to hold your short position in RIM for over 4 years.
Alternatively, if you believed in the iPhone, why not just invest in Apple? Their stock has risen 300% over that same period.
Good luck spotting the next iPhone. It wasn't exactly a given that the iPhone was going to be a success. And if you remove the recession, MSFT hasn't really moved it's just stagnent. Same for RIM from what I can see EDIT: I was wrong on rim they went to 100 bucks in 2008 but quickly dropped back to 40-50 range where they are now. I was looking at 2007 where they were in the same range.
I realize it's probably early, but can anyone find any layoff numbers? (even vague numbers, on a scale between "a few" and "a boatload" will be accepted)
I'd expect that the layoffs would be centered around the old OS. Anyone involved in the new OS is likely to be safe. Or at least that sounds like a logical approach.
I'd expect the layoffs to be around 5% maybe at most 10%, but really things can still turn around for RIM if they can get their new OS out in mass, so I think we are still not quite in a complete panic.
Blackberry had the smartphone lead in the UK for 2010 [1], and is still growing. [2]
Blackberry has a 42% share of the smartphone market in Canada. [3] They also dominate other markets like Argentina. [4]
I wouldn't count them out just yet. I don't see the Playbook getting much of a response from users who don't already use BBs, but their handsets will have a long life. They will have to move fast to keep up with Android, but I think this announcement is a good example that they are aware.
Not to mention their growth in India. Where 50 million subscribers get added every month. BB is growing very fast here and iPhone is not affordable to most of the indians.
The sad fact is that RIM just can't seem to decide where it's going as a company. They have an entire host of phones that are totally obsolete[1], their tablet doesn't run an operating system that was built in house[2] and for some reason they decided to force people to have a blackberry phone to get the very features most people would use the tablet for.[3] So if I'm in the market for a phone, why on earth would I go with a blackberry?(And no, BBM is not enough)
The potential deathblow for a lot of these struggling platforms is that Apple is coasting on a longer (15 month?) product cycle this year. RIM, Nokia (and Windows Phone generally)and HP's webOS platform are counting on big fall launches, but a big simultaneous iPhone launch might relegate the rest to noise. If the rumored new Nexus phone launches around the same time, it's not hard to imagine a 2 way platform race.
[+] [-] programminggeek|14 years ago|reply
It took about 3 years for most of the competition to catch up to what the iPhone launched as. Microsoft kept trying to ride the WP 6 train hoping the iPhone was going to flop and not become the next iPod. Eventually they had to do a major rewrite which put them a few years behind of iPhone. Oops. Blackberry Storm and Torch are both still below par and not even competitive against Android devices, let alone iPhone. Nokia never caught up at all with the iPhone.
Similar story is playing out with the iPad. Android is catching up on hardware, but not software ecosystem. Maybe that will be different in a year, but the market could certainly shape up to be more like the iPod dominance of music players than the iPhone/Android dominance of phones. Windows 8 will launch when? 2 or 3 years after the iPad. Sound familiar? Blackberry Playbook is out, but that's such a mess it's not worth discussing.
Steve Jobs was right back in 2007 and most of the market is still 2-3 years behind where Apple is.
[+] [-] zyb09|14 years ago|reply
This has never been the case in mobile development before. Although ObjC was a stranger to most people back then, it's certainly something you can learn and work with.
Next comes Google, again massive APIs, everything perfectly documented, tools that work. On top of that, the language of choice is Java and the former best platform for developer, Blackberrys, just looks severely outdated in comparison to Android.
RIM's root APIs basically didn't change since the age of monochrome-displayed Blackberrys. Over time they patched in support for colored displays, then 2-way navigation wheel, then 4-way navigation ball, and later on touchscreens. The reason the BlackBerry Storm has an extra 'click' in the screen (you could tap the screen to highlight something e.g. a button and then press the whole screen down, like a mouse button, to actually click the button), is that the whole User Interface APIs relied on onFocus and onClick events, something that comes from the times of the 2-way navigation wheel and is fundamentally incompatible with the way touch devices work.
Now in retrospect its easy to say they should have rewritten everything a couple years ago and started with a new OS from scratch, but that's a big risk to take and generally not how big companies work.
Anyway the new generation of modern smartphone OS'es is now in full swing and RIM OS is pretty much dead. Microsoft knows that, they started from scratch, Nokia knows that, they gave up on Symbian. RIM? They probably can hold on to business customers for some years, but recovery is gonna be hard.
[+] [-] paul9290|14 years ago|reply
There are many decisions Jobs and company have made that for me has made Android look more attractive. I currently own an iPhone and have so for over a year now, but there are things I want it to do that it can not while Android can. When my contract is up Im getting a Nexus or EVO.
I want to enjoy flash, i want to truly run apps in the background, i want the ability to have voice search on home screen via click of a button, i dont want to have to go through sync process when i connect iPhone ( i dont want to find out how to stop sync), I want Google's awesome built in GPS and I want the ability for more customization.
Ive enjoyed my iPhone but playing with girlfriend's Droid X2 and her prior Droid Incredible just showed me Im on the wrong platform. Though Apple's customer service is almost unmatched - will miss that.
They have hordes of cash now but to me with what I mentioned above maybe Apple is truly headed down and destined to repeat it's own history?
[+] [-] ghshephard|14 years ago|reply
It's complex - because a lot of factors come into play. iPhone has better battery life (as long as you don't touch the GPS), Android has more freedom, WP7 has a nice engaging interface, RIM is unbeatable in messaging, etc...
But, it would be nice to see what people think of their smart phones a year after purchase, and add _that_ into the unweighted graph [1] of Profit/Market Share/Revenue Share that Asymco does.
I guess, to some degree, that's represented in a "Will you buy the same model during the next refresh" - and the answer to that question might be a good proxy for "How happy are you, one year later, with the value you receive from your smart phone"
That, too me, will be a key indicator of which of the mobile providers will prevail.
[1] http://www.asymco.com/2011/05/26/a-new-mobile-phone-market-i...
[+] [-] code_duck|14 years ago|reply
Apple is really hitting their stride, after almost 30 years, and the state of the market is perfect for a company just like them. With how closed they are, though, I don't think they'll dominate. That seems to be fine with Apple, though - they're not after the next Windows.
I think the momentum behind Android, and the wide variety of companies using it, is going to keep it at the #1 mobile OS spot. The future of the ones other than Android and iOS doesn't look great for phones. Tablet are still so new, that it's difficult to predict what will happen.
[+] [-] wslh|14 years ago|reply
In other words, it seems like even if MSFT, Nokia, RIM and Google have virtually infinite money they can't catch up. That's a real competitive advantage for Apple.
[+] [-] india|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shareme|14 years ago|reply
1. No OS license costs 2 plugged into java dev ecosystem which has large dev base 3 Mobile Operators love android OEM terms
[+] [-] Apocryphon|14 years ago|reply
I wanna believe.
[+] [-] RobIsIT|14 years ago|reply
2. RIM needs to stop being shy about where they manufacture their products. They need to bring manufacturing completely (as in 100%) in to North America and advertise the heck out of that. Apple relies on inexpensive, cheap labor - hit them in the marketing cahones.
3. RIM needs to build a profitable developer marketplace. The only reason anyone cares about iOS Apps is because there is a chance small developers can make a lot of money developing. RIM needs to create a system where developers can easily earn money. From in-app purchases, to a robust in-app ad serving platform to flexible purchasing options, RIM needs to take a giant step back and let a developer develop any app they want and charge any way they want.
4. RIM needs to remember that it is first and foremost, a hardware company. They've never been good at making pretty software that works well. Palm, Handspring, HP, Microsoft, and Apple have all at one time or another beat RIM time and again with software - but rarely hardware. Mobile Internet Devices don't need to be complicated or even revolutionary - they just need to be sturdy, refined and fashionable. Forget about saving money on Curve keyboards, forget about trying to breakthrough some crappy "clicking screen", build really great hardware, even if that hardware doesn't conform to the latest trends.
5. Last, RIM needs to kick cellular providers in the butt. They need to step up where Apple hasn't and make their consumer level data plans inexpensive, open and user friendly.
[+] [-] andrewcross|14 years ago|reply
1) Very true. Apple is anal about the smallest details, RIM isn't. RIM has too many products in parallel development to dedicate the kind of resources they would need to match Apple. Just can't happen. Just accept it and come with your own style. 2) I absolutely love this. RIM does have a lot of manufacturing done overseas, but they have a very modern manufacturing facility right in Waterloo. Bring it all here and hype that up. It might flop, but it's a ballsy move that people would appreciate. 3) I am not sure if this is the case anymore, but for a while there, BlackBerry's were being shipped without App World on them. Wtf! 4) I disagree here. Their acquisition of QNX was brilliant. Use the playbook and you realize that it's an entirely different operating system than OS6. I think it could be very successful on their phones. 5) Interesting. Would help to become the low-cost smartphone while keeping margins relatively high.
In my opinion, it all comes down to how well QNX can create a compelling smartphone operating system. Do it well, and RIM will do just fine capitalizing on their legacy customers and getting those who want a keyboard. Screw it up, we might be looking at the next Palm.
[+] [-] dantheman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlear|14 years ago|reply
1. Agree to a degree they already doing it on Playbook by taking good stuff from WebOS whenever I use iPad I wish I had PB ui on it. 2.It would take a very good marketer to pull this off and make real money. Not sure about it. 3. You can make money on AppWorld and competition is not like on iOS. They have payment and ad api. They also now introducing BBM sdk, which could be a massive money maker for some apps that can integrate with it. 4. I do not think they can do this, huge part of their brand is software (security BBM etc) QNX is what will either save them or kill them I think. 5. Not sure, my plan costs me $35 cdn and its unlimited sms, 5gb of data etc (go WIND!)
QNX is the key, I just hope we do not have to code in flash to make stuff for it.
This si an exciting time to be a dev in mobile I think both RIM and MS can really surprise many people who think this is all over. US is farm from the only market, people here tend to forget that.
[+] [-] forgottenpaswrd|14 years ago|reply
2. So people that is not North American, like Europeans, Japanese, Chinese and South Americans have more reasons to not choose it. Do you honestly think that you(Americans) are the center of the world?
3.4.Yes, they have to.
5. They can't kick their customers!! Remember that RIM does not have a direct sales channel as Apple has, they need cellular providers. It is terrible expensive to have it(you need billions of dollars in inventory).
[+] [-] ineedtosleep|14 years ago|reply
5. So much of this, but I doubt they have enough power to do this anymore. Case in point: BESX (the free enterprise server). When BESX came out everyone was happy until Verizon were assholes and still required some nonsense fees that BESX was supposed to make free.
I don't know how much things have changed since then -- it's been about a year now -- but I doubt its any different now.
[+] [-] Steko|14 years ago|reply
Did you miss where Apple negotiated the dump pipe iPad plan?
[+] [-] ssharp|14 years ago|reply
When RIM made emailing from the road a very simple process, and created an enterprise-class system for businesses, their brand hit its peak. When they tried to leverage themselves into the consumer market, they did have some initial success. But when they were starting to actually jump into the pond--after dipping their toes in--Apple came in and sucker punched the entire market in January 2007.
All of a sudden, big players like RIM were behind the curve, figuratively and, for RIM, literally.
They essentially had a 6-month period to get phones that could compete with Apple and nobody really did a good job. The first iPhone was very vulnerable--no native apps, EDGE, and big price tag--but by the time anyone could offer an iPhone-like experience, Apple had the 3G, native apps, and a lower price tag.
RIM seemed to simply take too long to close their gaps. Their first touchscreen had a hugely misplaced marketing campaign. When RIM released the Storm, they made their SureTouch (or whatever it's called) screen a huge focus. Differentiation is certainly a product strategy, but it seemed like a fairly ridiculous thing to try to base your marketing around. At the time, a lot of people were weary of touchscreens vs. physical keyboards, but the added "value" of the SureTouch didn't come close to a physical keyboard and hindered the use of the touchscreen.
It seems like RIM's major problems were with product design / development, coupled with bad marketing. They controlled the business market, which helped drive the consumer market, and then lost control of it.
[+] [-] zmmmmm|14 years ago|reply
Nokia has a similar problem, I think. When people imagine Nokia they imagine a 1990s era dumb phone, or at best a crippled feature phone. It doesn't matter what else Nokia does, they are defined that way in the consumer mind.
When people think of Android they think of Google, super smart things like mapping, searching, voice recognition, translation, calendaring, etc. They feel like they are on the edge, living in the future.
And when they think of the iPhone they think of the slick, super smooth experience, the games and multimedia features, apps.
It doesn't really matter what any of these companies do, they'll continue to be defined this way and only Android & iPhone have a truly positive image in this new world. WP7 is hard to define and I'm divided on whether Nokia is good or bad because when Nokia becomes an influence on the brand it may well act like a boat anchor rather than the winch MS obviously wants it to be.
[+] [-] dr_|14 years ago|reply
This really could have, and should have, been done a while ago, but it's seems like Mike Lazardis is on some kind of a ego trip.
[+] [-] DenisM|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbesto|14 years ago|reply
No, he's just doing what any good CEO of a large enterprise should do - increase shareholder value. They've pushed strong numbers from 2007 and have only recently started to plummet. (for now obvious reasons) Innovator's dilemma at its finest.
[+] [-] jessedhillon|14 years ago|reply
I had a Blackberry 8830 a few years ago and, even at that time, I thought it was a barebones POS. The email client was pretty unremarkable, as I recall.
[+] [-] gamble|14 years ago|reply
The decision to ship it without email or calendaring, though... I don't know what they were thinking.
[+] [-] hluska|14 years ago|reply
Cost Optimization Program: The company also announced that it will begin a program to streamline operations across the organization, which will include a headcount reduction. This realignment will be focused on taking out redundancies and a reallocation of resources to allow us to focus on the areas that offer the highest growth opportunities and align with RIM strategic objectives, such as accelerating new product introductions.
(Source - Research in Motion's first quarter results for fiscal 2012 - page 2 - retrieved from http://press.rim.com/financial/release.jsp?id=5051)
I wish that companies would ditch the PR speech when they announce layoffs.
[+] [-] jsmcgd|14 years ago|reply
I'm only saying this because I'm still bitter from my last employment where this kind of business talk was routinely used to fill the void where management's vision was supposed to be. It really begins to grate.
[+] [-] diogenescynic|14 years ago|reply
"RIM's real problems center around two big issues: its market is saturating, and it seems to have lost the ability to create great products. This is a classic problem that eventually faces most successful computer platforms. The danger is not that RIM is about to collapse, but that it'll drift into in a situation where it can't afford the investments needed to succeed in the future. It's very easy for a company to accidentally cross that line, and very hard to get back across it."
[+] [-] potatolicious|14 years ago|reply
I disagree with this part. RIM's products are just as good/bad as they've always been - the problem is that Apple came in and raised the bar across the board, and Google came in and did it some more.
RIM is creating early-2000s product in a landscape that has been completely reshaped by iOS and Android.
[+] [-] nextparadigms|14 years ago|reply
What RIM didn't realize is that this was happening because of their global inertia, not because their products are still very competitive with iPhones and high-end Android phones. After all, there are still a lot of people who keep buying high-end Nokia phones rather than iPhones or Android phones.
It's all about inertia. They experience growth in new markets (for now - just a matter of time) but their core markets are fading away. This could blind them for years from seeing that they will be in trouble eventually, because overall they were still making a lot of money until more recently.
[+] [-] DenisM|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afterburner|14 years ago|reply
Most technology companies of any kind actually.
[+] [-] slashclee|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saturdaysaint|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bentlegen|14 years ago|reply
Alternatively, if you believed in the iPhone, why not just invest in Apple? Their stock has risen 300% over that same period.
[+] [-] nkassis|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirkules|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imjustatechguy|14 years ago|reply
I'd expect the layoffs to be around 5% maybe at most 10%, but really things can still turn around for RIM if they can get their new OS out in mass, so I think we are still not quite in a complete panic.
[+] [-] Steko|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doublerebel|14 years ago|reply
Blackberry has a 42% share of the smartphone market in Canada. [3] They also dominate other markets like Argentina. [4]
I wouldn't count them out just yet. I don't see the Playbook getting much of a response from users who don't already use BBs, but their handsets will have a long life. They will have to move fast to keep up with Android, but I think this announcement is a good example that they are aware.
[1] http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/201105/6765/BlackBe...
[2] http://m.mobilemarketingmagazine.com/mobilemarketing/i/artic...
[3] http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/6/c...
[4] http://www.nextwirelesslatam.com/index.php/1-3g/symbian-and-...
[+] [-] digamber_kamat|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daimyoyo|14 years ago|reply
[1]http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/02/rim-announces-blackberry-...
[2]http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/27/rim-introduces-playbook-t...
[3]http://www.intomobile.com/2011/01/10/blackberry-playbook-tab...
[+] [-] troutwine|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saturdaysaint|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithnoizu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grandalf|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsghjty|14 years ago|reply
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