4 ms·

Ouch. Imagine you're working at RIM and then try reading that letter. How insulting it must be to be a senior developer at RIM and to read that you're just not

by Joeri 15y ago

Ouch. Imagine you're working at RIM and then try reading that letter. How insulting it must be to be a senior developer at RIM and to read that you're just not good enough. IMHO, RIM's leadership is focused on the past, and on the wrong market segment. They're desperately trying to win over business users, while not realizing that they've already lost that market and will never get it back. At the same time they're largely ignoring the feature phone segment which is going to upgrade to a smartphone in the coming years, and who could be easily lured in by the current BB products, if they just make them a little bit more user-friendly. My wife thinks her BB curve is a better phone than my samsung galaxy s2. On paper, that's a ridiculous comparison (the curve isn't even 3g). In reality, she only uses it for calling, texting, e-mail and facebook, and it's not inferior at all for those things. She doesn't want a touchscreen, she doesn't want tons of apps, and there are a lot of people like her.

runjake 15y ago
> there are a lot of people like her But not enough to sustain RIM as a viable player, which is the core of their problem.
- izend 15y ago
  And the profit margin will be a lot smaller on "dumb phones".
zem 15y ago
my sister has a blackberry, and while she's not the touchscreen-and-tons-of-apps type, she was definitely annoyed that voip integration came built into my phone, and she couldn't get it on hers. (i think there are some apps now, but a few years ago it just wasn't doable). there's always the danger of missing out on that one killer app that everyone suddenly decides is a smartphone sine qua non.
Apocryphon 15y ago
I think one issue to note is that Apple and Google have basically won the "universal app ecosystems." They have more apps than anyone else, that can do anything. So to go for a strategy that focuses on the casual consumer market and doing core features really well would basically be running for third place: they'd be fighting against Windows Phone and webOS, not to mention the remnants of Meego. Though, perhaps, that is a more winnable fight.
Silhouette 15y ago
> In reality, she only uses it for calling, texting, e-mail and facebook, and it's not inferior at all for those things. I was in the market for a decent phone for my own business purposes a few months ago. I don't use (and don't want a UI to be cluttered by) MyTwitBook+. I do want phone calls and messaging. I do want some basic PIM tools. I do want some basic web browsing and useful apps. And I want them to be easy to use, efficient, and safe. For me personally, that means things like a physical keyboard, good sync'ing with other devices and software I work with, and robust security features on the phone. (I tried the leading smartphones at the time, and just didn't get on with touchscreens for typing significant amounts of text.) Does this sound like any particular company's traditional target market? Of course it does. Then I went to the store, and checked out the BlackBerry Torch. And I found that its screen was half the resolution of everyone else's model of that generation. I found that its e-mail integration wasn't nearly as straightforward as it could be. I found that it didn't have a well-established browser that could put up modern web sites at an acceptable speed. Best of all, I found that the store wanted to charge me several hundred pounds to get a Torch on a 24-month lock-in plan. In the UK, I could at the time have picked up a top-of-the-range phone from pretty much anyone else for free on a 24-month plan, or I could have bought those top-of-the-range devices unlocked to use on any carrier's monthly plan for not much more than the money the Torch was going to cost me with the lock-in. In short, I should have been RIM's perfect customer. I wound up buying a £20 Nokia non-smartphone on a 1-month plan, which still gets me the separate number/phone for business use that I really wanted, and I just use a laptop or similar for the other stuff. As my younger friends might say, epic fail.
astrodust 15y ago
The sheer magnitude of their mistake is staggering. Instead of digging in to the enterprise email market when Microsoft was asleep at the wheel, with Exchange Server going nowhere, with Google still trying to pitch their Apps product as Enterprise-Ready, they were busy making pink Blackberry phones for teenage girls. How can you lose when the President of the United States loves your product? You get complacent. You get distracted. RIM had an opportunity to take out Exchange Server, to kick SharePoint's ass, to supplant the truly awful Lotus Notes with something even marginally better, so long as it worked well on the Blackberry phones that everyone had. With Nortel as much as dead, they could've even made big gains into enterprise phone systems, IP telephony, and who knows what other off-shoots once you conquer that. They could've provided VPN solutions with the Blackberry serving as a key, something the banks would've bought the instant somebody made it. Instead everyone has to use these awful RSA tokens, and they never really worked as the recent breach proved. RIM could've become the go-to company for IT email and groupware, but instead they chased after consumer market share. They chased after text-messaging teenage girls and got blown out of the market when Android could offer a cheaper product with more features. They're lucky that Microsoft sabotaged Danger for them or they'd actually have competition. So damned sad.

by Joeri 15y ago

runjake 15y ago

> there are a lot of people like her But not enough to sustain RIM as a viable player, which is the core of their problem.

izend 15y ago
And the profit margin will be a lot smaller on "dumb phones".

zem 15y ago

my sister has a blackberry, and while she's not the touchscreen-and-tons-of-apps type, she was definitely annoyed that voip integration came built into my phone, and she couldn't get it on hers. (i think there are some apps now, but a few years ago it just wasn't doable). there's always the danger of missing out on that one killer app that everyone suddenly decides is a smartphone sine qua non.

Apocryphon 15y ago

I think one issue to note is that Apple and Google have basically won the "universal app ecosystems." They have more apps than anyone else, that can do anything. So to go for a strategy that focuses on the casual consumer market and doing core features really well would basically be running for third place: they'd be fighting against Windows Phone and webOS, not to mention the remnants of Meego. Though, perhaps, that is a more winnable fight.

Silhouette 15y ago

> In reality, she only uses it for calling, texting, e-mail and facebook, and it's not inferior at all for those things. I was in the market for a decent phone for my own business purposes a few months ago. I don't use (and don't want a UI to be cluttered by) MyTwitBook+. I do want phone calls and messaging. I do want some basic PIM tools. I do want some basic web browsing and useful apps. And I want them to be easy to use, efficient, and safe. For me personally, that means things like a physical keyboard, good sync'ing with other devices and software I work with, and robust security features on the phone. (I tried the leading smartphones at the time, and just didn't get on with touchscreens for typing significant amounts of text.) Does this sound like any particular company's traditional target market? Of course it does. Then I went to the store, and checked out the BlackBerry Torch. And I found that its screen was half the resolution of everyone else's model of that generation. I found that its e-mail integration wasn't nearly as straightforward as it could be. I found that it didn't have a well-established browser that could put up modern web sites at an acceptable speed. Best of all, I found that the store wanted to charge me several hundred pounds to get a Torch on a 24-month lock-in plan. In the UK, I could at the time have picked up a top-of-the-range phone from pretty much anyone else for free on a 24-month plan, or I could have bought those top-of-the-range devices unlocked to use on any carrier's monthly plan for not much more than the money the Torch was going to cost me with the lock-in. In short, I should have been RIM's perfect customer. I wound up buying a £20 Nokia non-smartphone on a 1-month plan, which still gets me the separate number/phone for business use that I really wanted, and I just use a laptop or similar for the other stuff. As my younger friends might say, epic fail.

astrodust 15y ago

The sheer magnitude of their mistake is staggering. Instead of digging in to the enterprise email market when Microsoft was asleep at the wheel, with Exchange Server going nowhere, with Google still trying to pitch their Apps product as Enterprise-Ready, they were busy making pink Blackberry phones for teenage girls. How can you lose when the President of the United States loves your product? You get complacent. You get distracted. RIM had an opportunity to take out Exchange Server, to kick SharePoint's ass, to supplant the truly awful Lotus Notes with something even marginally better, so long as it worked well on the Blackberry phones that everyone had. With Nortel as much as dead, they could've even made big gains into enterprise phone systems, IP telephony, and who knows what other off-shoots once you conquer that. They could've provided VPN solutions with the Blackberry serving as a key, something the banks would've bought the instant somebody made it. Instead everyone has to use these awful RSA tokens, and they never really worked as the recent breach proved. RIM could've become the go-to company for IT email and groupware, but instead they chased after consumer market share. They chased after text-messaging teenage girls and got blown out of the market when Android could offer a cheaper product with more features. They're lucky that Microsoft sabotaged Danger for them or they'd actually have competition. So damned sad.