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RIM's reply to jammur's open letter

devblog.blackberry.com

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

#11

Post by dangrossman »

dshanley wrote: post #8
ambirex wrote: 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... )

Sorry to be that guy, but the word is waive, not wave.

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

#12

Post by CWIZO »

ambirex wrote: 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.

It seems, from the post, that they only made plans to address the webpage issues (registration, download, ...) but not the real problem: the PITA development process. But to be fair, it is the weekend so I think we can assume they hadn't had much time to go over this.

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

#13

Post by JanezStupar »

dotBen wrote: post #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 probab…

Indeed the company I used to work for would be never capable of such a feat.

1. They would take at least a month to notice (if at all), 2. Nobody would go to write an actual response, 3. The customer would be flagged as "that pedantic asshole", 4. Any internal dissenters who would notice the whole deal would be ignored or coerced into obedience.

Oh and not to mention that said organization has immense illusions of grandeur.

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

#15

Post by Locke1689 »

maxharris wrote: post #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.…

(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)

This is a really good point - GeoIP is almost guaranteed to be accurate enough to determine country of origin now. We should no longer have to deal with that crap.

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

#16

Post by relix »

maxharris wrote: post #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.…

As an off-topic, pedantic aside: the Belgian Apple site requires me to select a language every time I visit. They don't store it in a cookie or try to deduce it from the browser locale settings. Just saying your comparison with Apple here is not that relevant.

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

#17

Post by Stormbringer »

dotBen wrote: post #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 probab…

They don't deserve any credit at all, because people have been complaining about this since literally day 1.

Now admittedly they might have initially gotten drowned out by the screams of a million java developers wailing and gnashing their teeth about having to pay big $ to do everything with the adobe tools (or, alternatively to do everything on the command line, which is a huge pain in the bum when you're having to learn a new toolkit from scratch).

The fact that it has taken them ~6 months to take their fingers out of their ears and stop saying "la la la la la we can't hear you" indicates just how humungously badly messed up RIM is right now.

They don't deserve credit, they deserve a bullet. And the way they are headed the market is going to give them one.

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

#18

Post by Stormbringer »

JanezStupar wrote: post #13
dotBen wrote: post #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 probab…

Indeed the company I used to work for would be never capable of such a feat. 1. They would take at least a month to notice (if at all), 2. Nobody would go to write an actual response, 3. The customer would be flagged as "that pedantic asshole", 4. Any internal dissenters who would notice the whole deal would be ignored or coerced into obedience. Oh and not to mention that said organization has immense illusions of gr…

Please note that this isn't an over the weekend spur of the moment thing, these are complaints that people have been making loudly for months.

Your company with the one month time to notice and make a response is actually responding 5 times faster than RIM in this instance. Scary eh?

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

#19

Post by Stormbringer »

maxharris wrote: post #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.…

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

Mike Kirkup had promised free Playbooks to devs who got their apps submitted early on. (NB: I don't know if that still applies, that was last year.) So there's a pretty good reason, submit an app, get some free hardware.

The main reason though would be if you were a Flash developer. Playbook looks like an absolute godsend for them, because they can just take their flash app, wrap it as an archive (presumably signing it and zipping it up) and plop it straight into Playbook. I'm not aware of any other mobile platform that runs adobe stuff natively like that.

Of course, all of RIM's developers were Java guys, so you can imagine that the subset of their developer base that were also secretly Adobe fanboys was actually quite small...

Nokia and RIM both seem to be massive train-wrecks in the whole 'looking after your developers' department. Maybe the guys in Waterloo have been taking coaching from Elop or some other major Microsoft shareholder.

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

#20

Post by Stormbringer »

pedrocr wrote: post #7
tlear wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The bad press is just some people going into hysterics at some scenario that might possibly happen at some distant point in the future.

Which is refreshing in a way, because usually when people are being that hysterical and illogical it is over Apple. Nice to see some other company getting that treatment for a change.

"Is this actually a meaningful revenue source?"

Obviously not. 0 x N = 0 after all. They will however try to make it up in volume (normally a bad joke, but in this case it makes sense). They are massively behind Google's and "the company which must not be named"'s app stores... how then will they come to market with a credible number of apps?

I think the switch to Flash is by RIM a vote of no confidence in their current developers, and I think they were hoping that a big bunch of Flash developers would jump on the band wagon. It might work, who knows. Flash developers have basically no other ways of monetising their work (other than page views of course) so it might seem like a good deal to them. RIM might have looked at their piddly number of apps available for sale for the blackberry and decided that their Java developers just weren't up to snuff.

Of course there are or were systematic issues with app world (basically not available for a very long time outside of the US, the carrier will often not install the app world app, or will delete it before selling the blackberries to the customers, even if you know of its existence it is hard to find etc.)

Also, if the Java developers suck so much, why has Google's app store got so many apps?

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