

I Told You RIM Was in Trouble - rkuester
http://www.appleoutsider.com/2011/03/25/rimm/

======
wtracy
<wannabe pundit>

If I were at Palm now or before their acquisition by HP, I would be pushing to
ease up on the consumer focus and make an all-out attack on Blackberry's home
turf.

RIM has completely lost focus. It has taken its eyes off of its own flagship
product, and is busy trying to copy whatever anyone else is doing--but it
can't really make up its mind who it wants to copy.

I think WebOS could have been a tremendous hit in enterprise IT departments.
Anyone who can handle basic web technologies can write apps for it. If Palm
had focused on the enterprise segment, WebOS could have been God's gift to any
IT department saddled with a significant number of in-house applications.

Grab someone with a web development certificate from the junior college, give
them a month, and you can have an app on all your in-the-field employees'
mobile phones. Oh, and you can trivially port it to your desktop machines,
too!

</wannabe pundit>

~~~
VB6_Foreverr
"ease up on the consumer focus" sounds like a recipe for failure to me.

~~~
kjhgfghjm
It was for IBM, by abandoning trying to compete with DELL selling zero margin
laptops to home users and sticking to selling $Bn systems to $Bn clients for
$Bn they have a recipe for making $Bn

~~~
VB6_Foreverr
IBM? Isn't that the company who gifted the entire 'Personal' computer market
to Microsoft and Intel?

------
raganwald
_I think it's very important to understand that this idea of "no compromise"
matters. And this idea that you can pick whichever one you want._

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>

------
dlsspy
Whatever happened to <http://rim.jobs/> ? Apparently they're no longer hiring.

~~~
muppetman
Why is this comment being downvoted? That site linked was actually a site
where RIM were advertising jobs. Of course lots of people make the obvious
joke about it, but I don't think the comment deserves downvoting.

~~~
jarin
Apparently it left a bad taste in peoples' mouths...

------
jarin
"If that’s not a win-win synergy of agile infrastructure assets, well you need
to start pivoting."

My favorite part of the whole article.

~~~
bvi
I've started to loathe the word "pivot".

~~~
alexqgb
To remain an agile noun, "pivot" needs to pivot asap.

------
joeguilmette
link to the RIM CEO's talk. worth a read. if i had RIM stock i would be
frantically selling it right now. <http://pastie.org/1716857>

~~~
kosmonaut
I tried to read it but it's headache inducing (the talk, not the colors). Wow.

~~~
crasshopper
Don't understand what you two see as obviously wrong there. RIMM is betting on
speed and web (HTML5) over native apps.

I would rather get fast www pages than apps from the app store. If I can have
gmail, pdf's, wikip, and a few random pages open at once I'm very happy.

------
jrsmith1279
IMO RIM needs to "pivot" and enable their consumer devices for activesync. I
think there's still a market for their BES software in the Enterprise, but the
majority of small & medium businesses don't want to have to have a BES for
their users to have email on their phones. Most of them have Exchange servers
with activesync already in place. RIM even gives away the BES Express software
for free now and still we have clients who aren't interested. From my
experience with BES (Working for an IT Services provider with over 300
clients) I have found it to be a huge POS that works when it works, but when
it doesn't it usually requires either a blackberry specialist, or a call to
RIM's support.

------
tlear
They made a great decision with QNX. But flash and Adobe is what is going to
kill them

~~~
evangineer
I think RIM are going to do a Sega/Psion. They can't compete on devices and
will wind up delivering cloud-based services for other mobile platforms
alongside running a nice little business licensing QNX for embedded stuff.

------
DaZipper
Had the opportunity to play with the Playbook at Enterprise Connect a few week
ago. The only advantage the RIM guy could recite was that "it does flash". He
let me play with the tablet and it was very warm (almost hot) to the touch on
the back of the tablet. The buttons on the top felt cheap and like they could
break at any moment. When I told him it was good to see it's not vaporware,
but then mentioned my observations, he simply reminded me "yeah, but it does
flash". I wonder if these design issues are why it hasn't hit the market yet?

------
mpg33
The reality is that RIM is behind in product development by about 1-2 years
arguably...They have yet to release a phone that could even be compared to the
first iPhone...

I'm sure Apple has stuff in the pipeline that is much more advanced that is
currently on the market.

------
rbanffy
If there is any reason to assume RIM not to be doomed is this. If they manage
to leech off a competing ecosystem, they inherit its advantages immediately.
Assuming Google won't go Microsoft on them (as in Microsoft sabotaging Digital
Research), I see nothing bad coming.

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.

~~~
wtracy
So, they have the cost of integrating their platform with Android, and ...
what benefit, exactly, over just using Android?

Obviously, if you can avoid being commoditized by maintaining your own
software platform, that's great. I just don't see that RIM is bringing
anything to the table with their OS:
<http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=2263882>

~~~
rbanffy
What benefit would they have with their own, incompatible with anything else,
platform?

This way they can build differentiation full Android stack integrators can't.
That, of course, _if_ QNX proves a better environment than Linux.

This is, BTW, the same strategy Microsoft adopted eons ago, when the de-facto
standard business OS was CP/M. It was very easy to port your programs from
CP/M to MS-DOS (thanks, in no small part, to Intel making the 8086 asm-source
compatible with the 8085) and that allowed them to have a reasonable software
base from the start. Unfortunately, for CP/M, this was a one way road - it was
not as easy to port back.

If Rim can manage a superset of Android, they may have a fighting chance to
differentiate themselves.

~~~
wtracy
I fully understand the advantages of having your own platform.

At this point, I'm more concerned about their competency than their strategy.

~~~
rbanffy
I don't see having an exclusive platform as an advantage right now. If they
could pull off iOS API compatibility, that would be brilliant (assuming their
patent cross licensing with Apple adequately covered their asses) and could be
conceivably be done starting with GNUStep, but Android seems a good second-
best option.

OTOH, I believe the Apple app store TOS would prohibit any in-store app to be
distributed in any way other than the store, so, there is one interesting
contractual risk.

------
georgieporgie
_it’s limited to the all-but-obsolete Android 2.3 “Gingerbread” runtime._

Uh. 3.0 was created specifically to address tablet concerns, was it not? 2.3
is still the new hotness for phones.

~~~
Zev
The PlayBook is a tablet, not a phone.

~~~
5l
And yet Apple also trumpeted the numbers of apps available for the iPad on
launch, despite the vast majority of these being iPhone or iPod Touch apps not
optimised for the tablet.

~~~
danilocampos
That was a year ago, when they had no competition. Now the iPad has 65,000
apps optimized for its form factor. You don't get to compete with last year
and still win.

------
VB6_Foreverr
I'd be backing whatever the kids are adopting and round here all the teens are
getting blackberrys. Plus "We're the Blackberry Boys" seems to be on every
commercial break.

------
lazyant
What a trollish piece of BS, having two CEOs is not because RIM cannot decide
who's in charge; this person obviously doesn't now shit about RIM.

~~~
ceejayoz
Care to fill us in on why multiple CEOs is a good thing for RIM?

~~~
lazyant
Thanks for asking. I'm not saying having oen or two CEOs for a company is good
or bad, I'm saying the post is trollish and doesn't deserve to be in HN. Let's
see: it has no content, only an opinion that a company is going to do badly
because something the co-CEO said and because their new product is going to
have a feature (android) that gosh, is not the latest version. Also the
original author mentions having two CEOs as a big deal but there's no
indication of this being a problem in the past, it's like a tabloid article.

The problem is that any post talking about android, mobile, RIM, Apple, tablet
is "hot" and likely to get upvoted even if it's crappy.

Since people seem to think that I am in the wrong so fine, I've been in HN
since the beginning, tried to do by humble contributions but there's a lot of
aggression and the quality of posts has nosedived. I guess I don't belong, so
I'll exit quietly.

