One of the key issues for RIM is that the complete change in the underlying architecture of BB10 means that all existing 3rd party apps are going to have to be rewritten for it.
We have a fairly significant BBOS 6/7 user base in the corporate sector but with what's happening to RIM at the moment we can't come close to justifying that sort of rewrite when we could be putting that effort into Android or iOS.
Anecdotally even Windows Phone is getting more interest from our corporate clients, all (literally all) of our BB customers are seeing RIM as dead in the water and looking to move away.
Now we're in a particular niche but it's one where 18 months ago RIM looked like they might own it, now it looks like it's all over for them here at least.
Anecdotally even Windows Phone is getting more interest from our corporate clients, all (literally all) of our BB customers are seeing RIM as dead in the water and looking to move away.
This is the real challenge RIM faces -- in an ecosystem-based market people's buying decisions are driven as much by the health of the overall ecosystem as by the merits of an individual product within it. So when it becomes conventional wisdom that your ecosystem is unhealthy, you enter a death spiral: people won't buy your products because the ecosystem is unhealthy, but the only way to improve the health of the ecosystem is to get people to start buying your products again. It's brutal.
The only way out of it is to come up with a product that nails absolutely everything: great hardware, great software, great third-party support, great price. I'm not sure anyone's ever managed to pull that off, though. Palm tried with their webOS devices, but while the software on those was excellent and the price was reasonable, the hardware was abysmal and the third-party support anemic. So they weren't enough to pull Palm out of the death spiral.
>This is the real challenge RIM faces -- in an ecosystem-based market
It is no longer a smartphone market. It is, as you said, and ecosystem market. Incidentally, a phone's ecosystem goes beyond even the entire platform of the OS, and includes multiple OSes. Apple has reaped incredible benefits not just because iOS has a vibrant app store and it ends there, but because iOS has a powerful desktop OSX ecosystem that people want to link up with and get a value add from. The halo effect.
This is why I think RIM is essentially doomed. If they deliver an absolutely stunning operating system nested in a peerless hardware chassis that just nails it perfectly...they will have provided an answer to the wrong problem. I just have not heard RIM even whisper compellingly about how it is going to deliver that vibrant ecosystem that is absolutely not an option, in the face of challenges like BYOD, the lack of any developer interest, the historic lack of developer interest, the lack of an app store (yes I know), the lack of consumer media content to sell, etc. Do consumers even want another mobile OS even a little bit?. Devs absolutely will not show up until consumers by it in droves, and how is RIM going to deliver the chicken and the egg at the same time?
I believe they dropped the ball years ago, and now they are just paying the protracted price and it's probably too late. An incredible OS on incredible hardware isn't what they need to deliver, -just an absurdly small piece of it.
>This is why I think RIM is essentially doomed. If they deliver an absolutely stunning operating system nested in a peerless hardware chassis that just nails it perfectly...they will have provided an answer to the wrong problem
Personally, I don't care about an ecosystem because I don't use third party apps at all. An excellent piece of hardware running a fantastic OS would be great. In fact, the 9900 I have right now is pretty close. However I do believe that the ecosystem is of significant concern for the general use case. So what if they were to hire or contract a number of developers (or entire companies) to build something like the top 50 iPhone apps for BB10 and have that ready to go at launch? On top of that, make them free for a year and have the top 5 pre-installed on the device. Would people still complain about the ecosystem? What if they made their team of developers responsive, so that they are constantly building the most searched for and unfound apps? I can't believe that a perfect phone and perfect OS wouldn't be a very solid position from which to regain a decent stable market.
>Personally, I don't care about an ecosystem because I don't use third party apps at all.
Then you are a feature phone customer, not a smartphone customer, for the most part. Nothing wrong with that at all, but if they want to survive, they need to meet the full expectations of smartphone customers that want to utilize their devices to the hilt. As far as paying for the top 50 apps...it isn't feasible. The top 50 apps include many apps that are actually platforms in and of themselves. Coding for an entirely new OS induces obscene costs up front, and for ongoing support, and in order to justify those, there needs to be a substantial customer base, -not a hope for one and a substitute of cash in its place. RIM doesn't have enough money to bribe devs into bad business decisions on that scale. Unfortunately for RIM, apps are made by developers not on their payroll, and developers are independent business with bills to pay. They aren't going to waste their precious resources like money, time, infrastructure, marketing, and opportunity cost to build for an OS that has no customers at the moment. Classic chicken and egg scenario, and yes, a perfect OS on perfect hardware in no way implies a solid position from which to regain a decent stable market anymore. The market has matured.
Steve jobs didn't do "better in everything" when he came back. He knew he couldn't win the race, so he changed the rules : a computer had to be "pretty" as well, and (re)introduced a very strong emphasis on design, with the marketing that goes with it (remember those dancing translucent imacs).
I guess that means you don't have to be absolutely better on everything, but just one thing that others underestimated and which could compensate for everything else you may be lacking (imacs were expensive, slow,and not compatible with windows).
In the case of blackberry that could mean restart from a niche, such as extra-strong security, beat everybody else on that market with science-fiction stuff such as retina authentication, ultra strong encryption everywhere, etc...
This is a good point, and one that I should have thought of in my original comment: an alternate strategy is to keep the company alive by retreating to a defensible position, a niche that you own in some way that makes you a compelling alternative for customers in that niche, and then focus all your energies on owning the shit out of that niche. It's less ambitious, and the upside is smaller, but the risk of total failure is smaller too.
That's essentially what Jobs did with Apple -- we think of Apple as a huge success under his leadership, but that didn't really happen until they entered a different market with the iPod. Before then he kept them alive by giving up their ambitions to compete with Microsoft for the PC business in general and focusing their business on a few strong, high-margin products distinguished by classy design. They weren't enough to make Apple dominant again, but they were enough to keep the company afloat.
> (imacs were expensive, slow,and not compatible with windows).
Not one of those things is true, except for Windows compatibility which was hardly a concern for the users of it. The iMac was actually quite aggressively priced for the time, and it was far from "slow".
I hope you honestly try and launch something based off this philosophy, so you can see it crash-and-burn firsthand. The iMac had plenty more going for it at the time. Design was a big part of it, but it was far from the only good thing about the iMac as you insist.
iMacs had built in screens, high capacity hard drives (for the time), tray loading CD drives with burner options, USB, FireWire, etc... almost all of which was hot new shit at the time.
The iMac was the first example. Great product, experience, and price. It was just getting long in the tooth in terms of ecosystem because of Mac OS Classic.
In other words Jobs successfully pulled a Kobayashi Maru. I think his second coming was brilliant, and will be taught in business schools in the yers to come.
>This is the real challenge RIM faces -- in an ecosystem-based market people's buying decisions are driven as much by the health of the overall ecosystem as by the merits of an individual product within it.
Doesn't BB10 run Android apps? It may not run them well, but it's probably a good start before developers start writing native BB10 apps.
On the other hand the danger is that devs rely on the Android compatibility layer and ignore the native APIs like it happened with OS/2 and Windows/DOS compatibility.
Android apps need to be repackaged in order to run on a BlackBerry device, however the process (at least for me with 4 apps) is pretty painless. My four apps took about half a day. Add in the time it took to collect images and metadata and it took all of 7 hours work to prepare and submit them.
BB10 does indeed have an Android Player and in my experience it works pretty well. I played with it earlier in the year and while it did not support apps that made JNI calls at that time, it worked pretty well for vanilla Android applications. I assume JNI support will be added or perhaps has already been added since it's been while since I last looked at it.
I don't see why people would complain about no backwards compatibility with BB7. BB7 is legacy OS and almost a relic of another era compared to Android, iOS and QNX in BB10. If you are going to support apps for one other OS, Android is a much better target due to the sheer amount of apps out there.
If you're a corporate who've invested significantly in training, business specific software, support infrastructure and so on for a particular platform to be told you've got to start over is a massive deal and you care a whole load that your massive investment is largely for nothing.
Backward compatibility would have allowed many corporates (a significant market for RIM) to maintain that investment and if they could do that that would be a major reason to stick with RIM. The fact that RIM have cut them loose effectively means they have to start over and makes RIMs incumbency effectively worthless when it comes to business retention.
The worst thing I'm seeing in the mobile race is the two winners (iPhone and Android) are not adopting any of the good innovative things from the "losers". For example, WebOS is all but dead, had a ton of innovative things like Cards, Just Type, inductive charging, notifications on the bottom, and as far as I can tell, none of those things are being used (or are being used in a much more muted way) but iPhone and Android.
Instead the two big players are only adopting features from the other. To make matters worse, you can't easily (at all?) choose to install your own OS on a phone, so over time as the "losers" drop off we're going to be left with 2 phone plaforms that are more or less the same and haven't made any major UI changes since they became successful. And there will be no out for us who want something different.
What are you talking about? The UI guy behind webOS, Matias Duarte, is now the Android UX Director at Google. There's a good interview with him in the first episode of On The Verge: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K4HImSqR1k
- Swipe to dismiss notifications (Windows Phone also employed this from the get go).
- WebOS Cards in terms of multitasking is pretty similar to the current ICS/JB task switcher and swiping to close an app.
Edit: I read your intial comment again and I realize my response doesn't address your initial issue.
-----------------
I think Apple / Google will continue to innovate (i.e. Siri vs Google Now) but to expect them to bring forth major fundamental changes to a stable, developed platform with a large user based is asking a bit much.
> I think Apple / Google will continue to innovate (i.e. Siri vs Google Now) but to expect them to bring forth major fundamental changes to a stable, developed platform with a large user based is asking a bit much.
I don't expect them to. What they are doing is taking only proven successful features from each other, and making very minor tweaks otherwise. This is what incumbents do.
I'm lamenting on the fact that we -- programmers, power users, enthusiasts -- will likely have no where to turn in the near future as the "losers" of this cycle start falling off. We won't have the option to install an open source OS on our phones like we have with PCs.
> We won't have the option to install an open source OS on our phones like we have with PCs.
Except you're conveniently forgetting the fact that Android is open source. Google continues to release a phone each year with an unlocked bootloader, on which you can install versions of Android modified to your heart's content.
My point was not that we don't have choice today (we do), it's that we're not going to have choice in the not-so-distant future as these other OSes die off (incluing Firefox OS).
Sure, you can root some Android devices and install Android ROMS like Cyanogen... but those are just Android. We're going to lose the creativity we're currently seeing in Jolla, Windows Phone, Firefox OS, Blackberry, etc.
As someone who has switched from WebOS to Android to iOS, I definitely agree that I would be happier if some the best innovations on each system made it to other devices. But I think the current patent situation makes this basically impossible.
Anyway, power users will always have rooting/jailbreaking as an option for getting advanced features on their mobile devices.
There's ton of WebOS influence in the recent Android versions, Google Now cards, swipe to delete or close etc. Also, the Nexus 4 has wireless charging. Nokia and HTC's recent flagships also have wireless charging.
sigh I just knew when I wrote that that people would come back with examples that kinda-sorta have influence from other platforms. But I'm not talking about creating an app which uses cards; I'm talking about rethinking the fundamental way a UI component works. When Apple decided to rethink the way their notifications work they didn't look at the total landscape of ideas from around the industry or come up with their own; they just did it the same way their major competitor did it. When Android decided to rethink the way they handled multitasking they didn't look at the competitors and do something new; they threw lipstick on what they already had.
I'd argue that a big concept has to have a really, clearly, huge benefit in order to be added to an already established OS. Notifications at the bottom? Android notifications work just fine.
The obsession with usability extends to giving everything a shortcut key... Nobody else does this.
Windows Phone has an app for that. I have a tile on my home screen. Tap it and it creates a pre-populated email to my wife asking how her day is going.
It started off as an experiment but when she created an auto-response to the email things quickly descended into ridiculousness. The fact that my wife constantly tries to 'out-geek' me is one of the many reasons I married her.
In all seriousness, (this is HN after all), the WP App can automate tons of functions into a one tap process that otherwise would have required multiple steps.
A majority of the features described in the article are standard on all platforms. The first paragraph in the article didn't inspire me to think these were features the Blackberry alone could do. Like the different alerts? Pretty sure that's been a standard on all phones since about 2001.
On iOS, you can use Launch Center for that. You can make an Action, which when you tap on it creates a pre-populated email to your wife asking how her day is going.
I remember in the early 2000's when I told my friend, "I got a RIM-job." He laughed. I didn't get it. I got it.
I really do hope that RIM regains some of the ground they've lost. The playing field is starting to level off. In the next 18 months, I predict (crystal ball is out) that a handful of manufacturers will have nearly equal (buzzword)ecosystems. For RIM to be successful again, they MUST shock the market; do something to competitors aren't doing. It will no longer be about hardware specs, software features & functions nor ecosystem. They need to revisit Mike L's vision for innovation.
I know it's cool to hate on Blackberry now, and I have done it too, simply for the fact that when everyone warned them that Android and iOS will kill them, they refused to believe it - until it was already too late and they were going downhill fast. You don't try to adapt your company for the new market rules when it's going downhill and losing money. You try to see where the market is going years ahead and try to be one of the first to move in the direction, and avoid a collapse.
That being said, I like some of the innovations, especially UI ones, that they've done in BB10, and I hope they remain a strong competitor to Android and iOS.
---
"Hate" is a weird concept to bring up. RIM went from practically defining this market to having a substandard product. That's why most of their users are unhappy, not because their brand is simply unfashionable or some other kind of perceptual issue.
If BB10 is good, then great, maybe RIM can right the ship and become a real competitor again. We both hope this will be the case.
---
"Hate" is a weird concept to bring up. RIM went from practically defining this market to having a substandard product. That's why most of their users are unhappy, not because their brand is simply unfashionable or some other kind of perceptual issue.
If BB10 is good, then great, maybe RIM can right the ship and become a real competitor again. We both hope this will be the case.
I really hope that BlackBerry becomes the 3rd platform for mobile devices, and not Windows, because that will increase the chance that both Windows (on the PC) and BlackBerry (on mobile devices) will use open standards accessible to all.
I failed understand your train of thought here. Assuming Windows Phone takes 3rd place, how does that hurt open standards?
Are you talking about IE? IE10 on WP8 seems to be plenty fast if not faster than Safari or Webkit and seems to have decent HTML5 support. On the other hand, if BB10 takes 3rd place, all top three mobile platforms will use Webkit and then web devs will ignore the standards and code to the quirks of Webkit and stop testing on other platforms like Opera,Firefox or IE.(already happening since a few years in the wild). This will hurt open standards on the web and will favor one particular implementation.
Perhaps you're referring to Office on mobile when you say open standards?
I think the poster just has the general idea that having the same platform (Windows in this case) on both PCs and phones will make the platform vendor more likely to rely on proprietary integration between them, rather than be forced to use open standards for communication.
I really hope RIM makes it - their keyboards are beyond compare.
It seems like they've been putting a decent amount of effort into the ecosystem - with incentives for developers and all that. The one thing I haven't seen much about, which is a deal-breaker for me, is apps from Google. I really hope they're putting in enough effort to make sure there's good native Gmail and Maps apps (and Authenticator, though I realize very few people use that).
For what it's worth, I use Google Authenticator and Maps on my BlackBerry. Google pulled the Gmail app, but the native mail app supports Gmail quite well.
Actually if there will be some key Apps available, this might be of interrest for me. I'd opt for a phone that really works and does those things it is capable of very well.
Have been living with Android now for a while and realized that there are few apps I actually really use on a regular basis. Phone, Calendar (CalDAV please), Mail (IMAP please), Browser (Opera), Maps, Terminal, Compass (yes, I actually use that sometimes when checking outdoor locations).
All the other Apps are optional and I would not miss them.
One thing I loathe the most on actual smartphones is the battery life. If RIM manages to get some hardware out that will last a couple of days usage without having to load, then I'm interrested.
This isn't the first positive review I've read about BB10, so perhaps it has potential. Here's to hoping it is a success, as the more viable competition we see in mobile, the better. I work across the road from QNX, so it would be nice to see RIM succeed here.
I'm sure that BB popularity varies by geographic region, but for what it's worth I see far more BBs out in public here in Ottawa than I do iPhones. And not just in the hands of government employees, where you'd expect to see them. BBs seem to be extremely popular among high school and college aged people here, primarily due to BBM.
Yeah, I've seen the same anecdotal evidence in Capetown. BBM was the only thing keeping me on the RIM platform. Eventually I switched, but I think once BB10 comes out and is good, I'll switch back... just because I miss BBM.
I'm not surprised the OS is good. The playbook OS is good.
I will be surprised if RIM can overcome being several years late. I will be surprised if they can actually get third parties on board. The playbook couldn't.
We have a fairly significant BBOS 6/7 user base in the corporate sector but with what's happening to RIM at the moment we can't come close to justifying that sort of rewrite when we could be putting that effort into Android or iOS.
Anecdotally even Windows Phone is getting more interest from our corporate clients, all (literally all) of our BB customers are seeing RIM as dead in the water and looking to move away.
Now we're in a particular niche but it's one where 18 months ago RIM looked like they might own it, now it looks like it's all over for them here at least.