Imagine a device with Android as the OS and RIMs amazing, bullet proof, indestructible, long life batteried hardware.
RIM reports Q4 miss; Balsillie resigns as director, CTO out
41–50 of 56 posts
Re: RIM reports Q4 miss; Balsillie resigns as director, CTO out
#42RIM's greatest issue has been LEGACY.
RIM's focus on the enterprise ensures that a large number of their staff has to build hacks to ensure their software's backwards compatibility. Forget the entire "Flash as being dated" debacle and think more to the tune of Microsoft's Exchange servers and address databases from the 80s which RIM has to be compatible with.
Naturally, companies must decide whether they want to ditch this side of the business. RIM tried to dip its toes in both. To be fair, they were trapped into supporting legacy services. Legacy isn't something that can spinned off. For RIM, they would have had to cut out a huge portion of their business to try to innovate.
By comparison, Newer players in the mobile phone space (Apple, Google etc.) didn't/don't have to deal with legacy. That's why they have such a small presence in older large enterprise. Microsoft's mobile side had similar issues to deal with but I think that their newer platform has eliminated their legacy components so there is hope.
As a Canadian, I'm very sad to see RIM die off. U Waterloo will also suffer tremendously. With SRED going away, I wonder what the Canadian tech scene will look like overall. I think I'll consolidate my thoughts on this and write a blog post or something.
Re: RIM reports Q4 miss; Balsillie resigns as director, CTO out
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't matter. Everything dies. You get hugely successful, defining a new product. You build a very effective business to capitalize on your product. The state you were operating in when you designed/built your product is by necessity baked into your business. Life, for a time, becomes Very Good. But the world state changes. This is inevitable. You don't care — there's enough money in what you do so that changing…
> It doesn't matter. Everything dies. "Why do all companies die, wheras almost all cities survive? You can drop an atom bomb on a city and it will survive". http://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_o...
Excellent TED talk. Thanks for the link.
Re: RIM reports Q4 miss; Balsillie resigns as director, CTO out
#44RIMM made some major mistakes but was too arrogant as the market leader to take the competition seriously. 1) They Osborne'd their product line by prematurely showing off new products that weren't ready. 2) They tried to meet the iPad head-on in the consumer market by calling their device a Playbook but their strength is in enterprise. Thus the marketing message came out confused and having a pompous "Amateur hour is…
Talking about terrible marketing: they're running an aggressive television campaign in India right now showing a bunch of singing business men in suits chiming "We are the blackberry boys...."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LducWACdt88
This is one of the most obnoxious, male-centric ads I've ever seen and would never float in the west. Sure it's India... but it's sad that a western company thinks it's cool to run something that doesn't fly back home in S. Asia.
Re: RIM reports Q4 miss; Balsillie resigns as director, CTO out
#45Serious question: What viable options do they have besides being acquired?
The time for small course corrections has long since passed. The main option for them is to become smaller, and to do one thing well. Their perceived strengths are mobile messaging (BBM) and "security". If they became a software only company then they would be at the mercy of their (fickle) partners to get it deployed. When they are playing the hardware game then there is ferocious competition and you have to do a fu…
Yes. RIM still has a huge installed base, enterprise sales force, and is still the de-facto "secure" solution. If they could co-opt Android's app ecosystem and build a high-quality, secure Android, they could make a huge dent in the business market.
I proposed this to a RIM BD exec about 2 years ago, but he insisted it would be throwing away way too much of RIM's investment in secure kernels.
But in my mind, the battle was already lost: even most biz users aren't choosing a device based on the nth degree of security. If anything, they love the keyboard.
And for the small niche that truly needs security, RIM could keep one or two BBOS models alive.
Maybe they could still pull off such a strategy?
Re: RIM reports Q4 miss; Balsillie resigns as director, CTO out
#46RIMM made some major mistakes but was too arrogant as the market leader to take the competition seriously. 1) They Osborne'd their product line by prematurely showing off new products that weren't ready. 2) They tried to meet the iPad head-on in the consumer market by calling their device a Playbook but their strength is in enterprise. Thus the marketing message came out confused and having a pompous "Amateur hour is…
I think their biggest issue isn't any of those things. It's that they don't have modern phone SW and an app ecosystem. If they had adopted Android for the app ecosystem and the modern OS, then made a semi-secure version, they could've survived all those gaffes above.
Re: RIM reports Q4 miss; Balsillie resigns as director, CTO out
#47Witness failure: many people even 2 years ago said the co-CEO's need to either clean up shop or walk out... now that RIM's market is entirely ceded to Android/iOS... NOW they start shaking things up? Chances are, RIM will never be great again - they lost their edge, then sat on their hands for years living off yesterday's big hits. Question is, do they have anything that a acquiring company might find worth purchasin…
The only thing preventing them from being great again is institutional inertia. They still have a lot of sales, a strong enterprise footprint, brand and sales force. And they have a lot of users hooked on physical keyboards.
If they could just turn on a dime, they could easily own the enterprise market again by co-opting a modern OS with an app ecosystem (Android?)
Re: RIM reports Q4 miss; Balsillie resigns as director, CTO out
#48RIMM made some major mistakes but was too arrogant as the market leader to take the competition seriously. 1) They Osborne'd their product line by prematurely showing off new products that weren't ready. 2) They tried to meet the iPad head-on in the consumer market by calling their device a Playbook but their strength is in enterprise. Thus the marketing message came out confused and having a pompous "Amateur hour is…
Talking about terrible marketing: they're running an aggressive television campaign in India right now showing a bunch of singing business men in suits chiming "We are the blackberry boys...." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LducWACdt88 This is one of the most obnoxious, male-centric ads I've ever seen and would never float in the west. Sure it's India... but it's sad that a western company thinks it's cool to run som…
Oh please. I often see female centric ads on western tv and I dont get offended.
Re: RIM reports Q4 miss; Balsillie resigns as director, CTO out
#49In an attempt to alleviate the craptuclar collection of software, RIM gave out free Playbooks to Android Developers. Having now played with one I don't think it's that bad of a device, and I certainly trust it more than an iPad or Android tablet. However RIM is missing key software that they should have provided. 1) The PDF reader works, but it's functionality is as bad as the Adobe Reader on Android. 2) The browser…
3: Citrix receiver supposedly works, Splashtop is available
7: Lua is available (check on blackberry github repo) and I have seen experimental builds of Python at least.
Re: RIM reports Q4 miss; Balsillie resigns as director, CTO out
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you used the Silk browser? It performs like a pig. Turning off "Silk" is the only way to use it. Even then, it is substandard, in my opinion. If I have my Kindle Fire in my hands and need to look something up online I will usually put it down and reach for my iPhone on the nightstand. It is better than nothing on a device I use primarily for reading books, but I would steer clear of any phone running it.
I should have clarified; yes indeed, Silk does perform like a pig currently , but I like the idea behind it, and I believe that Amazon has the engineering chops to pull it off. Immediate access to the mobile phone market along with a huge amount of data that can go Amazon's way if they fix Silk, might make a partnership seem mutually beneficial. (Also, since the mobile phone market is still carrier dependent, Amazon…
Silk has the same ideas behind it which Opera has been pushing with Opera Mini/Mobile and Opera Turbo for years. There is no reason why Amazon cannot enjoy the same kind of tremendous marketshare as Opera does.