

RIP, RIM: The death spiral is underway - jfruh
http://www.itworld.com/mobile-wireless/160601/rip-rim

======
trotsky
_look at research firm NPD Group's latest first-quarter mobile OS numbers for
the U.S. market:

[...]

Apple's iOS, 28% (up from 19% [in Q4 2010])_

Wait, what? I had to clip that quote together a bit, but it certainly seems to
be what they're trying to say. Even given we're not too clear on what "mobile
OS numbers" actually means, it's hard to believe that any meaningful metric
has Apple's mobile platform growing from 19% to 28% between 4Q10 and 1Q11.
That's essentially a 50% increase quarter over quarter?

I can't tell if they just have a massive typo somewhere in there, but if they
actually think that's accurate it seriously calls into question their numbers
and conclusions about RIM.

~~~
mamp
Probably the bump from Verizon sales. It looks like the demand has cooled for
Verizon iPhones so the numbers might not be so impressive next quarter, unless
there is an exodus from RIM because of reporting like this.

iCrack doesn't have the same feel as Crackberry though...

~~~
trotsky
No doubt verizon sales gave apple a bump, but:

 _This morning, before the opening Bell, Verizon released first quarter
earnings results, finally disclosing iPhone 4 activations -- 2.2 million since
the device's February 11 launch. [...] During calendar Q1 2011, AT &T and
Verizon activations -- 5.8 million -- accounted for 37 percent of the 18.647
million iPhones sold by Apple, that's up from 30 percent a year earlier._

So verizon activations accounted for 2.2M out of 18.6M iphone activations or
~12%. You'd need to dilute that more for ipads and ipods, presumably leaving
you with less than 10% of the sales volume. Impressive, but not nearly enough
to explain a 50% jump.

[http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/ATT-and-Verizon-
iP...](http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/ATT-and-Verizon-iPhone-sales-
are-nearly-the-same-40000-per-day/1303398412)

------
vessenes
RIM can absolutely, easily pull this out. Probably a few different ways,
actually.

They make great hardware, and still have a vastly superior keyboard experience
to any softkey phone anywhere. They have buckets of cash, and had great,
really great earnings last year.

They have an ecosystem problem. This would be simple to remedy -- they just
need to commit to HTML5 for apps, maybe adopt jquery mobile as a
significantly-supported project.

Staff a small, awesome webkit team, and start making it dead simple to deploy
to Blackberry. Start a webstore to compete with Chrome's webstore, but this
one lets you take it with you on your Blackberry.

Second internal team would be dalvik support, adopting the android ecosystem.
RIM never really made a ton of money on the 'app' ecosystem; this would put
them on equal footing when being evaluated against Android.

I'll await my offer from the RIM strategy folks. : )

~~~
waterside81
I think you're brushing off sales & marketing too easily. RIM's problem isn't
that they just don't have compelling hardware/software, it's a market
perception now, too. Fine, say tomorrow they come out with the "iPad-killer" -
how do they convince people of this? What about all these people who have
invested in the i-ecosystem (Pads, Pods, Macs etc.), why would they switch?
And how do you win the hearts of devs who can build HTML5 apps + jQuery mobile
for the already existing platforms? RIM has so many chicken-and-egg problems.

They snooze, they lose (lost?).

~~~
vessenes
I'd say it's a matter of approaching strengths and weaknesses aggressively,
a-la Nokia.

RIM Strengths: keyboard, corporate relationships, extremely happy users,
historic hardware excellence

Weaknesses: shitty UI, no app ecosystem

Motorola was in this situation but with fewer strengths two years ago. Do you
really think that RIM would not benefit from being able to say:

"As always, the best keyboard in the business. Now, with access to Amazon App
Marketplace / Android Marketplace!"

To my mind it's entirely possible that RIM could bankroll itself through this
cycle with their current cash, but if they want to compete, aggressively, they
should probably adopt the android ecosystem as a compatibility layer.

An android phone that works excellently with Blackberry Server and has a
blackberry keyboard would be EXTREMELY appealing to a broad range of corporate
buyers, and many power-users as well.

~~~
schmod
Add "Godawful developer ecosystem" to that list of weaknesses.

JQuery was barely supported at all until the latest OS release, which isn't
being backported to the vast majority of their recent hardware. Because
developers are stuck catering to the lowest common denominator (and because
the upgrade cycle is a _lot_ slower in the corporate world), any improvements
are going to be moot for quite some time before most users can see any benefit
(or before developers are willing to invest time developing apps for BB OS 6).

The pre-webkit browser's specifications were written to behave similarly to
IE6, but somehow managed to even fail at _that_. It's a browser that's barely
even compatible with itself. Simply put, you cannot develop JS-based webapps
for it.

Developing a web-based BB app is also a weird and bewildering experience.
Development needs to be done entirely within Eclipse, documentation is
sparse/awful, and the entire development process is never laid out clearly
anywhere. The code signing requirements are particularly onerous. The
simulators are handy, because of the many device-specific peculiarities, but
never seem to actually work properly themselves.

RIM have dug themselves into a hole; they are faced with either continuing to
support their current (awful) platform, or completely alienating their
existing installed base. RIM really has no good options at this point, and a
bit of a chicken/egg situation. No good apps until everyone has a phone
supporting the "new" platform (whatever that is/will be), but nobody will buy
phones on the new platform because there are no apps for it.

~~~
vessenes
Yep, my point.

They need someone to cut the Gordian Knot and make a clean breast of things.
Who was Elop's counterpart over at Google??

------
garyrichardson
6 months to a year ago, a lot of people didn't believed me when I said RIM was
irrelevant. It was quite obvious when the iPhone came out that RIM was going
to need to make some big changes.

The only person I actually heard praise the BB UI was somebody who had gotten
a smartphone for the first time. Then he used my iPhone...

The only people I know still buying BB's are old and/or adverse to change.
That's about the market segment they have left.

~~~
rpeden
Interesting observation, because in cities I've observed (Ottawa and Toronto)
the type of people using BBs are the opposite of the ones you've seen.

Among young people I see around town, on the bus/train, etc., almost all of
them have BBs. This is particularly true for young women. I'm not sure exactly
why this is the case, but it seems that most of them prefer BBM over SMS.

~~~
Ismene
It's mainly because BBM is a non-threatening way to give out your contact
information. You can add a guy to your BBM list, chat with him and then if you
find out he's a crazy you can block him. The person can't constantly txt you
or call you back like with your cell phone number. It's brilliant for us
ladies. :)

~~~
glhaynes
Interesting. Seems like a big opportunity for a mobile carrier to push how
easy it is to block numbers on their service.

------
corin_
Stock price has taken a dive, <http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=RIM.TO>

Currently down more than 13% on yesterday's closing price, at 46.49 - to put
that into perspective, September 13th last year saw a low point of 45.40,
which is the lowest close since November 6th 2006 (45.33). By February 18th
this year it had got back to a ~9 month high of 68.92. The all-time high for
RIM was 149.90 in June 2008, but the price reached that level then dropped
back down all in the space of a few months.

TLDR of the above paragraph - last September the price of RIM stocks dropped
almost as low as it was in 2006 before it really started growing, and now
there is a possibility it will do so again.

Side note: this submission is to an editorialised piece (which in my opinion
is pretty badly written), would prefer it be straight to the source:
<http://press.rim.com/release.jsp?id=5015>

~~~
sandipc
The "source" you linked to only contributes to a small portion of this
article. The RIM press release doesn't make any mention of how RIM's
competitors are doing.

------
alizaki
RIM needs to become a services company and focus on what they did best -
enterprise class connectivity on the go. Take your set of tools and apps
across devices - and email is just one of the many things they can offer. IT
Depts dont really want to choose the phone people carry but have to
standardize. The Apple and Android divide will only get more polarized, if
Windows Phone does well, all the more better - imagine one set of RIM tools
integrating with every device in your company to offer secure email, security
+ wipe clean, documents, BBM, social features, etc. For that though, RIM will
have to become a software company. And they suck at that. The opportunity is
big enough to support a $30Bn company, for sure.

Oh and they should forget about consumers. That whole thing was just dumb.

~~~
DavidChouinard
It's much easier to sell mediocrity in B2B. There's no need to have truly
great products, a truly great salesforce is good enough.

So yes, that whole thing about consumers is ill-advised. Especially when
there's someone out there that's already figured out how to build truly great
products.

------
stevenj
Reading this made me think of these posts:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1996237>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2043613>

------
protomyth
I think the whole idea of competing with Apple or Palm was kind of foolish. I
think they had consumer number envy. It was amazing to watch them take their
successful, refined form factor and try to build an iPhone-clone in the Storm.
Now we see them take QNX (good) and try to have a bunch of different ways to
develop for it (Air, Android compatible, etc).

I really think they should have invested in an enterprise friendly development
environment (more JVM use), update the UI (remembering to leverage the
keyboard), and build appliances that were plug and play in enterprise data
centers. If they wanted to get radical, build a netbook that had a great
keyboard, 3G, and ran Blackberry apps.

------
Apocryphon
This makes me wonder how WebOS is faring at HP. They need to come up with some
sort of niche killer app and secure a stable foothold for themselves. I'm
surprised that RIM is dying so quickly; I thought their foothold was with jet-
setting business and politico types.

------
cturner
I've been told that RIM could improve their odds by making their corporate
install system better, and that awkward aspects of this count against
Blackberry adoption at the moment. Does anyone here have more knowledge about
this?

------
rwtaylor
It's more likely that RIM will switch to Android rather than selling to
someone else.

------
rorrr
Death spiral you say?

[http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bvg&chs=323x200&#...</a>

~~~
martythemaniak
RUN FOR THE HILLS!

On a more serious note, they're going through a tough period, but I expect
them to make it through. They are transitioning to a whole new OS, which is
too new and rough (I played with a playbook a bit) to carry their product
line, while their old OS is not good enough. The good news is that their
strong performance until now gives them enough slack to make the transition.

By Holiday Season 2012, they should have both tablets and phones all
transitioned to a polished version of QNX, which should allow them to be
competitive. The smartphone market is also growing very rapidly, so if they
manage to hold onto 2nd or 3rd place with ~15% share, that still means tens of
millions, if not hundreds of millions of devices sold per year.

All depends on execution however.

~~~
troymc
When you write "They are transitioning to a whole new OS" I assume you _mean_
"They are transitioning to a different OS" because the different OS is QNX and
it has been around for decades (so it's not a "new OS").

~~~
mixmastamyk
He's likely referring to a new shell on top.

------
abennett
It's not a good sign when investors are waiting for news of a sale and instead
they hear about low earnings and loss of market share.

------
bxr
A worse than expected quarter and their product is no longer top dog? I'd
hardly call that a death spiral. A march to mediocrity, maybe, if they don't
start producing products with wider appeal.

In all the IT World articles I've seen over the last week or so, they seem to
make over-the-top statements and exaggerate about everything. Not so much in
this particular article, but it seems like they don't have a very good
understanding of the technology they're covering.

