I Told You RIM Was in Trouble

I know your point was enterprise IT, but allow me to illustrate with a consumer example. The same reasoning applies.

Here in India, I see most of the hip young crowd carrying Blackberrys. Note that unlocked, grey-market iPhones are available in India at not-too-deterring prices. But Blackberrys are defacto, and all you see people doing is message, message, message.

We have some of the rock bottom rates on calls and SMS - yet you can buy a fixed-rate Blackberry messenger subscription at nearly every service provider in India which lets you do unlimited group messaging (irrespective of domestic or international). I think you can also group-message a certain number of multimedia items.

Now that is something that not even Apple has cracked. The system is seamless.

The only competition to Blackberry in the hip-messaging market will come with the Facebook phone which will seamlessly integrate the mobile angle to the Facebook Messaging platform.

R.I.M can only be broken by the final integration of Google Voice, Gizmo5, Slide/Disco and some form of video chat into Android. The notification-bar on Android is simply custom built for messaging notifications.

Jim, you can't have it both ways. "No compromise" means that there is only one way to do it, the best way. "You can pick whichever one you want" means that there's more than one way to do it and various compromises must be made to support them all. No matter, although it's oxymoronic to pursue both strategies, your actions have made it very clear that the Playbook is trying to do everything and is absolutely going to be a compromise product.

I believe your approach comes from your undeniable success in "The Enterprise." When you are selling one hundred tablets to individuals, the dynamic is this: Tablet A does a good job of appealing to half of the market. Tablet B does a good job of appealing to the other half of the market. Then the Playbook comes along and takes a compromise position, doing a mediocre job of appealing to the entire market. A and B divide the market, and Playbook gets table scraps.

However, the enterprise is allegedly different. The argument is that if a committee is choosing a single tablet to for 100 people to use, even if half would be better using A and the other half would be better using B, Playbook is "good enough" for everyone and so A is shut out, B is shut out, and RIM gets 100 Playbook sales.

I'd buy that argument if tablets will be purchased the way desktop PCs and corporate phones used to be purchased. However, some things have changed. You can have web apps that play identically on Android and iOS tablets. You can have push notification to both devices. You can get Exchange email on both devices. I am not sure that one corporation needs to standardize on tablets the way they needed to standardize on phones ten years ago or on PCs twenty years ago.

It might be that enterprises happily buy A for everybody, B for everybody, or let people use A or B as they prefer. Times seem to have changed in the last decade. Your company believes otherwise, that much is obvious, and you are betting thousands of jobs on your belief.

As Georges St-Pierre says, "Good luck with that."

http://raganwald.posterous.com/dear-jim

The Android stack, kernel excepted, is Apache-licensed (thanks, davidw). To graft Bionic (or any glibc workalike) on top of QNX should be a walk in the park in comparison to build a full competitive stack.