RIM's reply to jammur's open letter • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by raganwald » Sun, Feb 27, 2011, 4:24 PM UTC

Translation of PR-speak to English of RIM's reply to jammur's open letter:

We are responding to criticism just as we respond to competition: We announce that we're working on something wonderful which will ship Real Soon Now.

Actually doing something about our development tools and process will be prioritized with the same business processes that are responsible for doing something about Apple and Google fighting over our lunch in the tablet and greater mobile space.

My prediction:

Some time after it is far too late to stop independent developers from defecting to other platforms, RIM will discover that even their corporate strongholds are looking at switching to Android or iOS, and will get feedback about their tools from their existing customers.

They will then make something just like Blackberry Storm: It will have the surface appearance of a slick, easy to use developer process that will satisfy the CTOs playing golf with RIM salespeople, but will somehow be unusable in ways that make the actual developers cringe.

I think that senior RIM management should start visiting old folks homes and talk to people who worked in the disk drive business and the cable-actuated construction equipment business. They may find they have a tremendous amount in common with people managing those businesses.

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

#32

Post by laujen » Sun, Feb 27, 2011, 4:31 PM UTC

Thought I would share my RIM experience. We were pressed hard by RIM developer relation team in 2006/2007 to port our highly successful Palm/WinMo app to their platform. The pitch at the time was for their developer program and attending WES, their "developer conference" which was really an IT/big company gathering. I paid close to $2k per year to be in the program. (Keep in mind this is all before the iPhone was announced and shipped.) we provided a financial tool which was a huge chunk of the RIM customer base at the time.

After a decade of Palm, WinMo and Win development I can say that the tool set and tool process were the worst I had ever experienced, even including Palm OS 1.0 releases. Code signing was a horrible pain. But my $2k bought us lots of help from their tech team, which was fantastic.

Where things fell apart was around shipping. What I thought I was getting was some tech support and marketing position, but RIM's partners were pretty much ignored and we were quickly out of the loop. There were no app stores so site placement at RIM was critical. Any mentions of partner companies were well buried on their site and every time there was a special section focused on our customer sections, we were left out.

We stayed involved for another year until RIM revamped their developer program so you had to meet certain requirements to be involved, all of which were aimed at helping RIM. You had to bring customers or come to their dev conference -- not free -- and a host of other things that would earn us points to participate. This was on top of the $2k per year to be in the program.

So while it is good to see a response from RIM so quickly, I am highly skeptical that the company can really be developer-centric and do what is right for its community. The only way they get us as a developer now is to fully support Android software as all the rumors are indicating.

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

#33

Post by nachteilig » Sun, Feb 27, 2011, 4:55 PM UTC

relix wrote: post #16

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.

Your comment doesn't show his to be irrelevant at all. It's less clear what language someone hitting the belgian site would speak; at least Apple does the geolocation stuff automatically, which RIM doesn't. Nice try, though.

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

#34

Post by smiler » Sun, Feb 27, 2011, 5:04 PM UTC

laujen wrote: post #32

Thought I would share my RIM experience. We were pressed hard by RIM developer relation team in 2006/2007 to port our highly successful Palm/WinMo app to their platform. The pitch at the time was for their developer program and attending WES, their "developer conference" which was really an IT/big company gathering. I paid close to $2k per year to be in the program. (Keep in mind this is all before the iPhone was ann…

Why did they not pay you to be in the program? Did you ever make any money from RIM sales?

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

#35

Post by kabdib » Sun, Feb 27, 2011, 5:22 PM UTC

pi3832 wrote: post #14

Gah. The corporate-speak vocabulary obliterates any sincerity that may have been been in that letter when it was conceived. It reads like nothing more than "damage control".

The use of the word "challenge" is classic.

A simple, "We've told the X team to get a clue and fix the multiple registration form stupidity by next Friday" would go farther than eight paragraphs of borderline marketing bilge.

Of course, these are not the /actual/ problems at RIM. The real problems are the mindset and processes that allowed this type of stuff to happen in the first place. They have a long row to hoe to get their house in order, since it's probably fractally bad in there.

I should add: I was in a developer tools org once (at a certain large hardware company) that had nearly exactly the same problems: Expensive tools, confusing processes, and probably worse support than RIM has. Over years of trying, the underlying troubles were never fixed (but a lot of manager careers were lofted on internal promises and new "team initiatives").

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

#36

Post by laujen » Sun, Feb 27, 2011, 5:34 PM UTC

smiler wrote: post #34

laujen wrote: post #32

Thought I would share my RIM experience. We were pressed hard by RIM developer relation team in 2006/2007 to port our highly successful Palm/WinMo app to their platform. The pitch at the time was for their developer program and attending WES, their "developer conference" which was really an IT/big company gathering. I paid close to $2k per year to be in the program. (Keep in mind this is all before the iPhone was ann…

Why did they not pay you to be in the program? Did you ever make any money from RIM sales?

Barely. It was a colossal waste of time.

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

#37

Post by laujen » Sun, Feb 27, 2011, 5:36 PM UTC

raganwald wrote: post #31

Translation of PR-speak to English of RIM's reply to jammur's open letter: We are responding to criticism just as we respond to competition: We announce that we're working on something wonderful which will ship Real Soon Now. Actually doing something about our development tools and process will be prioritized with the same business processes that are responsible for doing something about Apple and Google fighting ove…

My guess is the company knows how bad the situation is and is trying to build a growing developer community around its devices... by making Android software run on them. I can't figure out why else RIM would do this?

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

#38

Post by westajay » Sun, Feb 27, 2011, 6:19 PM UTC

This topic could be boiled down to "nerds crapping on other peoples work". I've had a few direct emails with rim, and regarding playbook, they're listening.

This is a new platform, analogous to apple when they migrated to osx.

If this was 1998 you could replace every RIM with Apple in these threads.

It's a very easy thing to throw stones.

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

#39

Post by cpeterso » Sun, Feb 27, 2011, 9:09 PM UTC

Stormbringer wrote: post #19

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…

Adobe AIR also lets Flash developers package their Flash apps for iOS and Android.

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

#40

Post by teyc » Sun, Feb 27, 2011, 10:04 PM UTC

Stormbringer wrote: post #23

teyc wrote: post #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.

Yes, but there is a reason (believe it or not) that they gather personal information. The whole notary thing was news to me, but it was the one part of the debacle that actually makes good sense. The blackberry eco-system is to a certain extent based on trust. But the trust is backed by accountability. Every piece of code that runs has to be signed by RIM † using your personal signing key. That way if somebody writes…

RIM needs to study Conversion 101. Do you remember the bad old days of e-commerce, where you had to register for an account before you can add something to the shopping cart?

RIM's challenge here is to convert developers into RIM developers, i.e. people who are going to make them money. Why throw in any more hurdles than necessary?

Information should be requested at the last moment it is required. For instance, initially ask for an email just to ensure it the SDK results in a computer being vulnerable to security issues. Deployment to a virtual machine running beta versions should not require any code signing.