Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

RIM's reply to jammur's open letter

devblog.blackberry.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–48 of 48 posts

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

#41

Post by Stormbringer »

teyc wrote: post #40
Stormbringer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, initi…

It does require code signing, because deploying to a machine for testing is the same process as releasing it into the wild.

On the Blackberry for instance, I could put up a web page with a link to my test file and you could download it directly to your device.

Hence everything needs to be signed before it can run.

Now, that said, the crusty old IDE that they had for Blackberry development had an emulator built into it. Being an emulator there were certain things you couldn't do (make calls, bluetooth etc).

If you asked "why didn't they just do another emulator?" that would be a good question. Complaining about the code signing is not a good question - it is far too fundamental to how their whole infrastructure works.

Also, the code signing process itself is automated, so in terms of interrupting you workflow it is not too bad (if you have a good internet connection) - 15-30 seconds or less -I've seen corporate build files that were worse... much much worse. /twitch

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

#42

Post by Stormbringer »

laujen wrote: post #37
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?

I'm guessing that millions of Flash developers didn't descend on their device as their saving grace like they were hoping, and they're now in the position of having pissed off their developer base of Java programmers by trying to replace them with different developers.... have realised that failed, are now running around Waterloo going "oh crap oh crap oh crap we're screwed", and are now desperate to get back some love from the Java devs (hence Android).

-----

An alternate view, as presented not so long ago by one pundit is that RIM doesn't even realise how bad their position is, because they are still making a lot of money and still have a lot of market share. The thing is that if you drop from 30% market share to 20% market share that is bad, right? Well, what if the market tripled in that same time? You would be losing market share, but actually selling twice as many units as you did in the previous time period!

And RIM has had some gangbuster sales figures. Profit? Not so much. The pundits argue that the gangbuster sales are blinding RIM to the fact that their margins are rapidly disappearing.

----

So here's some scenarios:

(1) it is entirely possible that they have no idea how bad things are for them.

(2) they know, but they don't know how to fix it (because it depends on the whims of external developers, and yea forsooth we art mightily fickle beasts)

(3) they know and there are no quick fixes. The iPad was in semi-secret development long before the iPhone was announced. The iPhone was announced in 2007 I believe. You do the math. No wait, I'll do the math for you. This means that everyone else is 4-5 years behind Apple. The problems RIM are running into now are problems that Apple was solving back in 2006 or even earlier. Some things just take time.

(4) They have been surprised by the lack of enthusiasm/rate of abandonment from their old devs. RIM has a history of short term kludges to try to fix their developer relations. E.g. instead of maintaining their IDE and modernising it, they let it fester and rot, and then when it started to smell too much they jumped on the Eclipse plugin band-wagon (which was an ugly kludge at best). But my estimate would be that of any random sample of Java devs, at least 60% of them actively dislike Eclipse. So the band-aid solution just slices their pool of potential developers even more finely.

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

#43

Post by Stormbringer »

JanezStupar wrote: post #24
Stormbringer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well still kudos to them for actually responding in a humble fashion. Don't get me wrong - I see RIM as going the same way as NOKIA (read: nowhere fast). But to their credit - they were able to get an actual product to the market and get to where they can fall deep :).

They got the Storm to market pretty quickly too, and that was beyond horrible.

Have they actually started selling Playbooks? My understanding is that it has been in a state of "we'll release it real soon now" for quite some time.

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

#44

Post by delynator »

mgkimsal wrote: post #30

I've got some mixed reactions to their reaction. 1. Yes - great, they replied publicly. While others may have complained before, at least they're finally replying in public. 2. "Suggestions like his are critical in helping us improve our products and processes". Why should things ever be as remotely bad to start with as what the OP was describing? Downloading an installer program that just copies an ISO to a folder?…

+1 for mgkimsal. when will businesses learn that developer products (APIs, Appstores, etc) need QA and Ops support and SLAs and regression testing before release -- just like any other product they would put out there?

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

#45

Post by Locke1689 »

TillE wrote: post #29
Locke1689 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

> GeoIP No. No no no. Please don't do that. I know everybody does, but it's such a terrible idea. If you rely on geographical location to set language, you're ignoring travelers, expats, regions with multiple languages, etc. Look at my browser's Accept-Language header. Go with that. It's almost certainly what I want. If you have a really good reason to serve me content based on my location, use GeoIP to determine tha…

Fair enough, Accept-Language sounds better. The idea is the same though -- don't require a region splash page first. I had assumed that the reason for the splash page was different product offerings in the country, not language, but if the real reason is language then by all means use that.

I would prefer a combination though. If I live in Italy but am browsing in English, use the Italian product page via GeoIP but the language according to the Accept-Language header.

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

#46

Post by Locke1689 »

colkassad wrote: post #28
Locke1689 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

Unless you like to use Tor or just proxy for whatever reason through a server in a different country.

Too bad for those few random people. Guess they get lumped in with the people who don't use their ISP's DNS server.

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

#47

Post by bfe »

I got a bad feeling for RIM when my new Android G2 even had a nicer sync with Outlook than my Blackberry Bold, let alone comparing the apps at large. I still use the Blackberry as a nice backup alarm clock though.

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

#48

Post by relix »

nachteilig wrote: post #33
relix wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's much easier to see what language someone would speak since a browser specifies it in every HTTP request [1]. It's not only more deterministic than guessing where someone's geographical location is based on IP ranges, it also doesn't rely on ISPs updating database records. It is magnitudes easier and more reliable to check someone's language than it is to check someone's geolocation.

Next to that, if I select it once, I would hope Apple would be at least smart enough to save my selection in a cookie, so that when I visit the site tomorrow, it doesn't require me to enter the same exact information.

It's obvious Apple is dropping the same ball on browser locale here just as RIM does, so my comment disproves his comparison with Apple.

[1] http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14...

Post reply on HN