2 ms·

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

by laujen 16y ago

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 16y ago
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.

by laujen 16y ago

Stormbringer 16y ago

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.