

RIM's reply to jammur's open letter - karanbhangui
http://devblog.blackberry.com/2011/02/thanks-for-the-open-letter-to-rim-developer-relations/

======
maxharris
Meh. Why develop for RIM? They don't have any market share, and they're not
easier to work with than Apple (or the runner-up, Google). They're even behind
#3, Palm/HP. They haven't shipped, and I don't have any idea when they will. I
read the tech press pretty much every day, and I have no idea when this is
supposed to be. I assume this year?

If you're working on a RIM app, I'm asking you: why? I am honestly curious.

Edit: I went to rim.com, and after three pages and _six_ clicks (including
that funny country selector thing - why do I have to do this again? I don't
need to do this when I visit apple.com), I finally got to the "playbook" page.
But nowhere on that page is any indication of when I'll be able to buy this
thing, or any kind of online store that would let me order it. All I can see
is "Get Updates" which takes me to the form on the bottom of the page where I
can tell them how to send me a promotional newsletter. (This makes me glad
that I bought an iPad last April. If I had to wait for RIM, the best I could
do would be to print out a picture of their product, glue it to a thin book
and pretend that I have an iPad.)

Edit #2: You know, Palm made a great effort at almost this same thing,
_actually shippped their product_ , and they still sank (and they're only
relevant now because HP picked up the pieces) for messing up less than this.
How is this going to be any different, except that this time around, there's
won't be a suitor like HP to buy up what's left of RIM?

~~~
Locke1689
_(including that funny country selector thing - why do I have to do this
again? I don't need to do this when I visit apple.com)_

This is a really good point - GeoIP is almost guaranteed to be accurate enough
to determine country of origin now. We should no longer have to deal with that
crap.

~~~
TillE
> GeoIP

No. No no no. Please don't do that. I know everybody does, but it's such a
terrible idea. If you rely on geographical location to set language, you're
ignoring travelers, expats, regions with multiple languages, etc.

Look at my browser's Accept-Language header. Go with that. It's almost
certainly what I want. If you have a _really good reason_ to serve me content
based on my location, use GeoIP to determine that. Never ever use it for
language. And make it really easy to change both.

~~~
Locke1689
Fair enough, Accept-Language sounds better. The idea is the same though --
don't require a region splash page first. I had assumed that the reason for
the splash page was different product offerings in the country, not language,
but if the real reason is language then by all means use that.

I would prefer a combination though. If I live in Italy but am browsing in
English, use the Italian product page via GeoIP but the language according to
the Accept-Language header.

------
raganwald
Translation of PR-speak to English of RIM's reply to jammur's open letter:

 _We are responding to criticism just as we respond to competition: We
announce that we're working on something wonderful which will ship Real Soon
Now._

 _Actually doing something about our development tools and process will be
prioritized with the same business processes that are responsible for doing
something about Apple and Google fighting over our lunch in the tablet and
greater mobile space._

My prediction:

Some time after it is far too late to stop independent developers from
defecting to other platforms, RIM will discover that even their corporate
strongholds are looking at switching to Android or iOS, and will get feedback
about their tools from their existing customers.

They will then make something just like Blackberry Storm: It will have the
surface appearance of a slick, easy to use developer process that will satisfy
the CTOs playing golf with RIM salespeople, but will somehow be unusable in
ways that make the actual developers cringe.

I think that senior RIM management should start visiting old folks homes and
talk to people who worked in the disk drive business and the cable-actuated
construction equipment business. They may find they have a tremendous amount
in common with people managing those businesses.

~~~
laujen
My guess is the company knows how bad the situation is and is trying to build
a growing developer community around its devices... by making Android software
run on them. I can't figure out why else RIM would do this?

~~~
Stormbringer
I'm guessing that millions of Flash developers didn't descend on their device
as their saving grace like they were hoping, and they're now in the position
of having pissed off their developer base of Java programmers by trying to
replace them with different developers.... have realised that failed, are now
running around Waterloo going "oh crap oh crap oh crap we're screwed", and are
now desperate to get back some love from the Java devs (hence Android).

\-----

An alternate view, as presented not so long ago by one pundit is that RIM
doesn't even realise how bad their position is, because they are still making
a lot of money and still have a lot of market share. The thing is that if you
drop from 30% market share to 20% market share that is bad, right? Well, what
if the market tripled in that same time? You would be losing market share, but
actually selling twice as many units as you did in the previous time period!

And RIM has had some gangbuster sales figures. Profit? Not so much. The
pundits argue that the gangbuster sales are blinding RIM to the fact that
their margins are rapidly disappearing.

\----

So here's some scenarios:

(1) it is entirely possible that they have no idea how bad things are for
them.

(2) they know, but they don't know how to fix it (because it depends on the
whims of external developers, and yea forsooth we art mightily fickle beasts)

(3) they know _and there are no quick fixes_. The iPad was in semi-secret
development long before the iPhone was announced. The iPhone was announced in
2007 I believe. You do the math. No wait, I'll do the math for you. This means
that everyone else is 4-5 years behind Apple. The problems RIM are running
into now are problems that Apple was solving back in 2006 or even earlier.
Some things just take time.

(4) They have been surprised by the lack of enthusiasm/rate of abandonment
from their old devs. RIM has a history of short term kludges to try to fix
their developer relations. E.g. instead of maintaining their IDE and
modernising it, they let it fester and rot, and then when it started to smell
too much they jumped on the Eclipse plugin band-wagon (which was an ugly
kludge at best). But my estimate would be that of any random sample of Java
devs, at least 60% of them actively dislike Eclipse. So the band-aid solution
just slices their pool of potential developers even more finely.

------
dotBen
As someone who has worked on both sides of the table _(i've looked after
developer relations and I'm a developer)_ credit should be given for the fact
that this response was internally agreed, written and published during a
weekend.

I think the RIM response was great given the timing and don't be too quick to
decide it fell short given that the people who would need to be involved in
any change to their policies probably are not easily obtained during a
weekend.

Lets see what else happens over the course of the working week.

~~~
JanezStupar
Indeed the company I used to work for would be never capable of such a feat.

1\. They would take at least a month to notice (if at all), 2\. Nobody would
go to write an actual response, 3\. The customer would be flagged as "that
pedantic asshole", 4\. Any internal dissenters who would notice the whole deal
would be ignored or coerced into obedience.

Oh and not to mention that said organization has immense illusions of
grandeur.

~~~
Stormbringer
Please note that this isn't an over the weekend spur of the moment thing,
these are complaints that people have been making loudly for months.

Your company with the one month time to notice and make a response is
_actually responding 5 times faster than RIM in this instance_. Scary eh?

~~~
JanezStupar
Well still kudos to them for actually responding in a humble fashion.

Don't get me wrong - I see RIM as going the same way as NOKIA (read: nowhere
fast). But to their credit - they were able to get an actual product to the
market and get to where they can fall deep :).

~~~
Stormbringer
They got the Storm to market pretty quickly too, and that was beyond horrible.

Have they actually started selling Playbooks? My understanding is that it has
been in a state of "we'll release it real soon now" for quite some time.

------
laujen
Thought I would share my RIM experience. We were pressed hard by RIM developer
relation team in 2006/2007 to port our highly successful Palm/WinMo app to
their platform. The pitch at the time was for their developer program and
attending WES, their "developer conference" which was really an IT/big company
gathering. I paid close to $2k per year to be in the program. (Keep in mind
this is all before the iPhone was announced and shipped.) we provided a
financial tool which was a huge chunk of the RIM customer base at the time.

After a decade of Palm, WinMo and Win development I can say that the tool set
and tool process were the worst I had ever experienced, even including Palm OS
1.0 releases. Code signing was a horrible pain. But my $2k bought us lots of
help from their tech team, which was fantastic.

Where things fell apart was around shipping. What I thought I was getting was
some tech support and marketing position, but RIM's partners were pretty much
ignored and we were quickly out of the loop. There were no app stores so site
placement at RIM was critical. Any mentions of partner companies were well
buried on their site and every time there was a special section focused on our
customer sections, we were left out.

We stayed involved for another year until RIM revamped their developer program
so you had to meet certain requirements to be involved, all of which were
aimed at helping RIM. You had to bring customers or come to their dev
conference -- not free -- and a host of other things that would earn us points
to participate. This was on top of the $2k per year to be in the program.

So while it is good to see a response from RIM so quickly, I am highly
skeptical that the company can really be developer-centric and do what is
right for its community. The only way they get us as a developer now is to
fully support Android software as all the rumors are indicating.

~~~
smiler
Why did they not pay you to be in the program? Did you ever make any money
from RIM sales?

~~~
laujen
Barely. It was a colossal waste of time.

------
ambirex
While I'm glad to see RIM respond to Jamie's post, they didn't address the
ridiculous cost of the developer program. It boils down to $20/app.

I suspect the iPad will continue to dominate this year as more android
developers gear up for honeycomb. Where does that really leave the playbook.
Specs are great, but apps sell hardware.

~~~
dshanley
Just to clarify it's not $20/app - it's $20/app AND every update to that app.
It's $20/submission. I heard from developer relations that the fee has been
waved for the moment. RIM also used to want $2K/year for HTTP access over BIS.
I've heard this has been waved (but docs are still up saying this is a benefit
of membership: [https://partners.blackberry.com/web/guest/access-to-
blackber...](https://partners.blackberry.com/web/guest/access-to-blackberry-
internet-service-b-connectivity))

~~~
dangrossman
Sorry to be that guy, but the word is waive, not wave.

------
mgkimsal
I've got some mixed reactions to their reaction.

1\. Yes - great, they replied publicly. While others may have complained
before, at least they're finally replying in public.

2\. "Suggestions like his are critical in helping us improve our products and
processes". Why should things ever be as remotely bad to start with as what
the OP was describing? Downloading an installer program that just copies an
ISO to a folder? SDK and Simulator only available as separate downloads?
Repeated data entry on multiple screens? Does _no one_ at RIM sit down before
things are released and say "OK, let's test this end to end and see if it
really makes sense."?

Again - great that they responded, but having multiple poor experiences rolled
up together gives the impression that RIM just really doesn't care that much,
and can't be bothered to make the process for developers remotely
straightforward.

~~~
delynator
+1 for mgkimsal. when will businesses learn that developer products (APIs,
Appstores, etc) need QA and Ops support and SLAs and regression testing before
release -- just like any other product they would put out there?

------
dlokshin
Actions always speak louder than words. Their turn around time on these
promises will be the real reply.

------
extension
I worked in the RIM ecosystem for about a year and was always repulsed by
their inability to self-criticize, so a fast and humble response like this is
refreshing, even if it doesn't offer any solutions.

------
teyc
Some one is creating work for themselves inside RIM. Instead of here's a file
to DL, and some docs - it is "don't we want to grab some personal info?";
instead of "Push your apps here", someone has decided to put in another yak to
shave. If in doubt, just try to get some thing on the developers machine as
quickly as possible.

~~~
Stormbringer
Yes, but there is a reason (believe it or not) that they gather personal
information. The whole notary thing was news to me, but it was the one part of
the debacle that actually makes good sense.

The blackberry eco-system is to a certain extent based on trust. But the trust
is backed by accountability. Every piece of code that runs has to be signed
_by RIM_ † using your personal signing key. That way if somebody writes an app
that does something bad, they know _exactly_ who is to blame.

It is kind of the opposite of Apple's walled garden approach, but it achieves
the same goal - that end users can trust the software from dodgy third party
devs like you and me. In Apple's case it is because they 'carefully' _cough_
vet the apps. In RIM's case it is because they will come down on you like a
ton of bricks (wrapped in legal weasels) if you do anything dodgy.

†This applies _even for you writing and testing code on your own device_. You
have to send the code to RIM who sign it and munge it up with their 7 secret
herbs and spices and then they send you back a binary file that is what you
actually install.

~~~
teyc
RIM needs to study Conversion 101. Do you remember the bad old days of
e-commerce, where you had to register for an account before you can add
something to the shopping cart?

RIM's challenge here is to convert developers into RIM developers, i.e. people
who are going to make them money. Why throw in any more hurdles than
necessary?

Information should be requested at the last moment it is required. For
instance, initially ask for an email just to ensure it the SDK results in a
computer being vulnerable to security issues. Deployment to a virtual machine
running beta versions should not require any code signing.

~~~
Stormbringer
It does require code signing, because deploying to a machine for testing is
the same process as releasing it into the wild.

On the Blackberry for instance, I could put up a web page with a link to my
test file and you could download it directly to your device.

Hence everything needs to be signed before it can run.

Now, that said, the crusty old IDE that they had for Blackberry development
had an emulator built into it. Being an emulator there were certain things you
couldn't do (make calls, bluetooth etc).

If you asked "why didn't they just do another emulator?" that would be a good
question. Complaining about the code signing is not a good question - it is
far too fundamental to how their whole infrastructure works.

Also, the code signing process itself is automated, so in terms of
interrupting you workflow it is not too bad (if you have a good internet
connection) - 15-30 seconds or less -I've seen corporate build files that were
worse... much much worse. _/twitch_

------
pi3832
Gah. The corporate-speak vocabulary obliterates any sincerity that may have
been been in that letter when it was conceived. It reads like nothing more
than "damage control".

~~~
kabdib
The use of the word "challenge" is classic.

A simple, "We've told the X team to get a clue and fix the multiple
registration form stupidity by next Friday" would go farther than eight
paragraphs of borderline marketing bilge.

Of course, these are not the /actual/ problems at RIM. The real problems are
the mindset and processes that allowed this type of stuff to happen in the
first place. They have a long row to hoe to get their house in order, since
it's probably fractally bad in there.

I should add: I was in a developer tools org once (at a certain large hardware
company) that had nearly exactly the same problems: Expensive tools, confusing
processes, and probably worse support than RIM has. Over years of trying, the
underlying troubles were never fixed (but a lot of manager careers were lofted
on internal promises and new "team initiatives").

------
westajay
This topic could be boiled down to "nerds crapping on other peoples work".
I've had a few direct emails with rim, and regarding playbook, they're
listening.

This is a new platform, analogous to apple when they migrated to osx.

If this was 1998 you could replace every RIM with Apple in these threads.

It's a very easy thing to throw stones.

------
bfe
I got a bad feeling for RIM when my new Android G2 even had a nicer sync with
Outlook than my Blackberry Bold, let alone comparing the apps at large. I
still use the Blackberry as a nice backup alarm clock though.

------
shareme
Gee and we wonder why RIM might be attempting to get android apps to run on
playbook? Considering that most android markets require you to use their
market app..good luck with that RIM

