4 ms·

Does RIM Want Palm?

14 points by raganwald 17y ago

raganwald 17y ago
As Fake Steve Jobs quipped, this would be like the the number two and number three sprinters trying to beat number one by strapping their legs together and running three-legged.
- ableal 17y ago
  Analogies are a dime a dozen. If the #3 sprinter has the running shoes and water bottle that #2 is lacking ... Interesting bit (news to me) in the original piece: the Canadian purchased a perfectly decent operating system for future devices in early April for an estimated $200-million, when it bought a small player named QNX Software.
  - raganwald 17y ago
    > Analogies are a dime a dozen Oh yes, absolutely. A witty analogy is often just that, a quip. I do think that many mergers motivated by the desire to dethrone the leader do wind up with an entity that is weaker than its constituent parts. IIRC, FSJ was talking about MSFT and YHOO merging to take on GOOG. In this case I think the analogy supports the article's conclusion, which is that RIM is in no hurry to buy Palm. If I can strain the metaphor, buying Palm would be like teaming up to run a race three-legged because you're thirsty and the other runner has a water bottle. Buying QNX was like buying a water bottle.
    - ableal 17y ago
      Yeah, I knew it was a quip, and with this half-truth biz (cf. Karl Kraus), there's a lot to it. Even with perfect fits, companies manage to screw up. They are hopping around one-legged, figure that a left leg would go nicely with their right one. Buy left leg, insist on it wearing right-handed shoes (lots in stock). Shoot left foot off to make it fit. (snapping sound, strained analogy's back breaking ;-)
      - raganwald 17y ago
        Hahaha! Getting serious for a moment, I don't envy RIM if they buy Palm. Having bought QNX, a bunch of their engineers might have been disgruntled over the obvious message that their own stuff is junk and that the company doesn't trust them to fix it. Some will have bought into QNX, some will be resisting it. Then they buy Palm and all the engineers who bought into QNX suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them. While upper management are blinking in the flash bulbs, shaking hands at press conferences, and boasting about RIM's road map for taking over the world, middle management will be desperately trying to keep the talented people from quitting in disgust.
        jlin 17y ago
        No, QNX and RIM actually came from the same birthplace - the University of Waterloo. I bet you the principles of each company even had beers with each other when they were in their salad days, debating technical decisions, or hashing over names for their respective products - So for RIM engineers, buying QNX is pretty much the equivalent of reuniting with your long lost twin brother. While they are in radically different industries, and have radically different products, the laser sharp focus on engineering is the same. And I bet you any RIM engineer you ask will definitively state that QNX is a much better real time OS [focus being on real time] than anything RIM has ever put out - it's akin to asking whether your kid brother who competes in the Olympics is good at their sport or not.
  - dagw 17y ago
    I wonder how hard it would be to port the WebOS userland to run on QNX. That could turn out to be a pretty awesome platform for RIM to build on.
- halo 17y ago
  You could have said the exact same thing about Apple buying NeXT in 1996.
  - raganwald 17y ago
    Actually, I freely admit I did say that. And I don't think that if the same thing happened again I'd be wrong. Steve Jobs has beaten very long odds with Apple to date. I don't think it's a good idea to look at a merger like this and think "Apple pulled it off, so the stock must be a bargain." At that time the iMac lay in the future, the iPod lay in the future, and obviously the iPhone lay in the future. Betting that the merger with NeXT would led to success with products that didn't even exist yet is no better than giving Steve Jobs a couple of hundred million to launch NeXT in the first place. And that wasn't a good bet.
mdasen 17y ago
This seems to be the best buyer for Palm from my perspective. HTC and others are currently selling popular Android devices and there's little sense for HTC to sell Android, Windows Mobile, and an HTC owned webOS to consumers. RIM, on the other hand, could use Palm much like Apple used NeXT. webOS could become the foundation of the next generation of BlackBerry devices. It provides the same all-in-one experience that RIM does on a more modern platform. They would just need to integrate it with the tools that business people buy BlackBerries for. Combined with the BlackBerry name, it could go far. Other manufacturers have already cast their lot with Android and it wouldn't make sense for them to offer both Android and webOS since they would have to keep pouring money into webOS development rather than getting mostly free Android development. And, to be frank, consumers have shown that they prefer Android. RIM is really the company whose weight could change that. A "BlackBerry" webOS running with one of RIM's keyboards and integrating with their Enterprise Server could do well in terms of market-share.
- mrtron 17y ago
  Sure the best bet for palm, but not for RIM. I think people are missing the point with RIM. Their existing operating system has a very solid foundation. Everything low level is very optimized for two things important on mobile: battery life and efficient use of networks. The devices work very well. Most importantly: they work very well in big business. Their GUI isn't flashy. Their venture into touchscreen went poorly. But neither of those seem like a reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
elblanco 17y ago
Please, RIM is in severe need of a major OS update. Blackberry OS was kinda okay 7 years ago, but the devices I see now are more or less the same ones I was using in 2003.
- mrtron 17y ago
  The new OS version is coming out shortly I believe. But what exactly is it in need of? My only complaint is their menuing system is not very pretty.
  - elblanco 17y ago
    It reeks of "don't care". It's clunky in places, everybody has to roll their own gui toolkit to make anything that looks halfway decent, performance isn't that great (maybe the devices are slow), crap is buried in long lists of settings, I can use a microSD card with it but it's pointless because I can't install anything to that card, restarting the device is a pain since I have to approve a dozen security policy dialogs that don't fit on the screen, typography is a disaster. I once accidentally his the wrong security setting when installing Opera on mine and I have no idea how to change it, after a year of poking around and a full system wipe. So now, every time I go to surf the web, I have to spend 5 minutes fighting past security authorizations. All this was okay in 2000, but the devices haven't evolved one bit since then. I got mine new, just on the market, in '08 from my company. Really, even with a new OS, the devices need to get with the times. Buying WebOS would give them a halfway decent, well thought out OS, and force their hand with the crappy hardware.
    - mrtron 17y ago
      Really? This sounds pretty weak reasoning to buy a company for a half-decent OS. a) Performance is never bad on blackberries - what are you talking about? Always far better performance than my iphone. b) You are complaining about a 3rd party app's security settings? c) You can't install to a microSD card but is that a problem? There is good reason to not allow app installations on a hotswappable card obviously. They provide plenty of room for app installs on the internal memory. d) Use a 2000 era device and then use a new bold 9700. You cannot be serious claiming the devices themselves haven't evolved. Blackberries are amazing devices, it just seems like a small group of people love to hate on them for unknown reasons. Just like a different group loves to hate on iPhones. What you are saying here is like saying Apple should buy Palm because their OS is garbage because it doesn't support multiple applications and you can only sync through itunes.

14 points by raganwald 17y ago

As Fake Steve Jobs quipped, this would be like the the number two and number three sprinters trying to beat number one by strapping their legs together and running three-legged.

ableal 17y ago
Analogies are a dime a dozen. If the #3 sprinter has the running shoes and water bottle that #2 is lacking ... Interesting bit (news to me) in the original piece: the Canadian purchased a perfectly decent operating system for future devices in early April for an estimated $200-million, when it bought a small player named QNX Software.
- raganwald 17y ago
  > Analogies are a dime a dozen Oh yes, absolutely. A witty analogy is often just that, a quip. I do think that many mergers motivated by the desire to dethrone the leader do wind up with an entity that is weaker than its constituent parts. IIRC, FSJ was talking about MSFT and YHOO merging to take on GOOG. In this case I think the analogy supports the article's conclusion, which is that RIM is in no hurry to buy Palm. If I can strain the metaphor, buying Palm would be like teaming up to run a race three-legged because you're thirsty and the other runner has a water bottle. Buying QNX was like buying a water bottle.
  - ableal 17y ago
    Yeah, I knew it was a quip, and with this half-truth biz (cf. Karl Kraus), there's a lot to it. Even with perfect fits, companies manage to screw up. They are hopping around one-legged, figure that a left leg would go nicely with their right one. Buy left leg, insist on it wearing right-handed shoes (lots in stock). Shoot left foot off to make it fit. (snapping sound, strained analogy's back breaking ;-)
    - raganwald 17y ago
      Hahaha! Getting serious for a moment, I don't envy RIM if they buy Palm. Having bought QNX, a bunch of their engineers might have been disgruntled over the obvious message that their own stuff is junk and that the company doesn't trust them to fix it. Some will have bought into QNX, some will be resisting it. Then they buy Palm and all the engineers who bought into QNX suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them. While upper management are blinking in the flash bulbs, shaking hands at press conferences, and boasting about RIM's road map for taking over the world, middle management will be desperately trying to keep the talented people from quitting in disgust.
      - jlin 17y ago
        No, QNX and RIM actually came from the same birthplace - the University of Waterloo. I bet you the principles of each company even had beers with each other when they were in their salad days, debating technical decisions, or hashing over names for their respective products - So for RIM engineers, buying QNX is pretty much the equivalent of reuniting with your long lost twin brother. While they are in radically different industries, and have radically different products, the laser sharp focus on engineering is the same. And I bet you any RIM engineer you ask will definitively state that QNX is a much better real time OS [focus being on real time] than anything RIM has ever put out - it's akin to asking whether your kid brother who competes in the Olympics is good at their sport or not.
- dagw 17y ago
  I wonder how hard it would be to port the WebOS userland to run on QNX. That could turn out to be a pretty awesome platform for RIM to build on.
halo 17y ago
You could have said the exact same thing about Apple buying NeXT in 1996.
- raganwald 17y ago
  Actually, I freely admit I did say that. And I don't think that if the same thing happened again I'd be wrong. Steve Jobs has beaten very long odds with Apple to date. I don't think it's a good idea to look at a merger like this and think "Apple pulled it off, so the stock must be a bargain." At that time the iMac lay in the future, the iPod lay in the future, and obviously the iPhone lay in the future. Betting that the merger with NeXT would led to success with products that didn't even exist yet is no better than giving Steve Jobs a couple of hundred million to launch NeXT in the first place. And that wasn't a good bet.

mdasen 17y ago

This seems to be the best buyer for Palm from my perspective. HTC and others are currently selling popular Android devices and there's little sense for HTC to sell Android, Windows Mobile, and an HTC owned webOS to consumers. RIM, on the other hand, could use Palm much like Apple used NeXT. webOS could become the foundation of the next generation of BlackBerry devices. It provides the same all-in-one experience that RIM does on a more modern platform. They would just need to integrate it with the tools that business people buy BlackBerries for. Combined with the BlackBerry name, it could go far. Other manufacturers have already cast their lot with Android and it wouldn't make sense for them to offer both Android and webOS since they would have to keep pouring money into webOS development rather than getting mostly free Android development. And, to be frank, consumers have shown that they prefer Android. RIM is really the company whose weight could change that. A "BlackBerry" webOS running with one of RIM's keyboards and integrating with their Enterprise Server could do well in terms of market-share.

mrtron 17y ago
Sure the best bet for palm, but not for RIM. I think people are missing the point with RIM. Their existing operating system has a very solid foundation. Everything low level is very optimized for two things important on mobile: battery life and efficient use of networks. The devices work very well. Most importantly: they work very well in big business. Their GUI isn't flashy. Their venture into touchscreen went poorly. But neither of those seem like a reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

elblanco 17y ago

Please, RIM is in severe need of a major OS update. Blackberry OS was kinda okay 7 years ago, but the devices I see now are more or less the same ones I was using in 2003.

mrtron 17y ago
The new OS version is coming out shortly I believe. But what exactly is it in need of? My only complaint is their menuing system is not very pretty.
- elblanco 17y ago
  It reeks of "don't care". It's clunky in places, everybody has to roll their own gui toolkit to make anything that looks halfway decent, performance isn't that great (maybe the devices are slow), crap is buried in long lists of settings, I can use a microSD card with it but it's pointless because I can't install anything to that card, restarting the device is a pain since I have to approve a dozen security policy dialogs that don't fit on the screen, typography is a disaster. I once accidentally his the wrong security setting when installing Opera on mine and I have no idea how to change it, after a year of poking around and a full system wipe. So now, every time I go to surf the web, I have to spend 5 minutes fighting past security authorizations. All this was okay in 2000, but the devices haven't evolved one bit since then. I got mine new, just on the market, in '08 from my company. Really, even with a new OS, the devices need to get with the times. Buying WebOS would give them a halfway decent, well thought out OS, and force their hand with the crappy hardware.
  - mrtron 17y ago
    Really? This sounds pretty weak reasoning to buy a company for a half-decent OS. a) Performance is never bad on blackberries - what are you talking about? Always far better performance than my iphone. b) You are complaining about a 3rd party app's security settings? c) You can't install to a microSD card but is that a problem? There is good reason to not allow app installations on a hotswappable card obviously. They provide plenty of room for app installs on the internal memory. d) Use a 2000 era device and then use a new bold 9700. You cannot be serious claiming the devices themselves haven't evolved. Blackberries are amazing devices, it just seems like a small group of people love to hate on them for unknown reasons. Just like a different group loves to hate on iPhones. What you are saying here is like saying Apple should buy Palm because their OS is garbage because it doesn't support multiple applications and you can only sync through itunes.