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RIM's reply to jammur's open letter

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Re: RIM's reply to jammur's open letter

#4
While I'm glad to see RIM respond to Jamie's post, they didn't address the ridiculous cost of the developer program. It boils down to $20/app.

I suspect the iPad will continue to dominate this year as more android developers gear up for honeycomb. Where does that really leave the playbook. Specs are great, but apps sell hardware.

Re: RIM's reply to jammur's open letter

#5
Some one is creating work for themselves inside RIM. Instead of here's a file to DL, and some docs - it is "don't we want to grab some personal info?"; instead of "Push your apps here", someone has decided to put in another yak to shave. If in doubt, just try to get some thing on the developers machine as quickly as possible.

Re: RIM's reply to jammur's open letter

#6
post #4

While I'm glad to see RIM respond to Jamie's post, they didn't address the ridiculous cost of the developer program. It boils down to $20/app. I suspect the iPad will continue to dominate this year as more android developers gear up for honeycomb. Where does that really leave the playbook. Specs are great, but apps sell hardware.

Cost is $0 currently and most likely will remain that way unless RIM somehow recaptures number one spot (not gona happen).

Re: RIM's reply to jammur's open letter

#7
post #6
post #4

While I'm glad to see RIM respond to Jamie's post, they didn't address the ridiculous cost of the developer program. It boils down to $20/app. I suspect the iPad will continue to dominate this year as more android developers gear up for honeycomb. Where does that really leave the playbook. Specs are great, but apps sell hardware.

Cost is $0 currently and most likely will remain that way unless RIM somehow recaptures number one spot (not gona happen).

So they're getting 0 in revenue and getting bad press about the potential 200$ price point that they set themselves. Seems like pretty bad marketing, unless they're trying to avoid the trap of not being able to raise the price later because of a built expectation of free.

Is this actually a meaningful revenue source?

Re: RIM's reply to jammur's open letter

#8
post #4

While I'm glad to see RIM respond to Jamie's post, they didn't address the ridiculous cost of the developer program. It boils down to $20/app. I suspect the iPad will continue to dominate this year as more android developers gear up for honeycomb. Where does that really leave the playbook. Specs are great, but apps sell hardware.

Just to clarify it's not $20/app - it's $20/app AND every update to that app. It's $20/submission. I heard from developer relations that the fee has been waved for the moment. RIM also used to want $2K/year for HTTP access over BIS. I've heard this has been waved (but docs are still up saying this is a benefit of membership: https://partners.blackberry.com/web/guest/access-to-blackber...)

Re: RIM's reply to jammur's open letter

#9
As someone who has worked on both sides of the table (i've looked after developer relations and I'm a developer) credit should be given for the fact that this response was internally agreed, written and published during a weekend.

I think the RIM response was great given the timing and don't be too quick to decide it fell short given that the people who would need to be involved in any change to their policies probably are not easily obtained during a weekend.

Lets see what else happens over the course of the working week.

Re: RIM's reply to jammur's open letter

#10
Meh. Why develop for RIM? They don't have any market share, and they're not easier to work with than Apple (or the runner-up, Google). They're even behind #3, Palm/HP. They haven't shipped, and I don't have any idea when they will. I read the tech press pretty much every day, and I have no idea when this is supposed to be. I assume this year?

If you're working on a RIM app, I'm asking you: why? I am honestly curious.

Edit: I went to rim.com, and after three pages and six clicks (including that funny country selector thing - why do I have to do this again? I don't need to do this when I visit apple.com), I finally got to the "playbook" page. But nowhere on that page is any indication of when I'll be able to buy this thing, or any kind of online store that would let me order it. All I can see is "Get Updates" which takes me to the form on the bottom of the page where I can tell them how to send me a promotional newsletter. (This makes me glad that I bought an iPad last April. If I had to wait for RIM, the best I could do would be to print out a picture of their product, glue it to a thin book and pretend that I have an iPad.)

Edit #2: You know, Palm made a great effort at almost this same thing, actually shippped their product, and they still sank (and they're only relevant now because HP picked up the pieces) for messing up less than this. How is this going to be any different, except that this time around, there's won't be a suitor like HP to buy up what's left of RIM?

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