RIM's Future Hangs On Developer Support For 'New BlackBerry' 148
alphadogg writes "With its future up for grabs, Research in Motion at its annual BlackBerry World conference next week will focus on simplifying development for its soon-to-be-unveiled BlackBerry 10 operating system. HTML5 is one key technology in that strategy to create a viable ecosystem of applications for a new generation of mobile devices expected to ship by year-end. The simplicity is needed because BB10, based on a real time kernel acquired with RIM's buyout of QNX Software Systems in 2010, is a complete break with the software that runs on standard BlackBerry smartphones. 'It's a bit of a challenge,' says Tyler Lessard, formerly a RIM vice president in charge of the global developer program, and since October 2011 chief marketing officer at mobile security vendor Fixmo. 'There's very little or no compatibility between the old and new operating systems. Existing apps can't be carried forward to QNX and BB 10. The question is, once the BlackBerry 10 smartphones launch, can RIM have an adequate catalog of apps?'"
Doing it wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Doing it wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Agreed. Layer your services on top of Android and be done with it. Why develop an OS, when a free one is there waiting for you to add to it.
Why would I buy a RIM when and LG or HTC or Samsung behaved the same? That's a recipe for death. It won't be long before google offers the same enterprise e-mail that rim does. What is the distinguishing feature?
Re:Doing it wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlike LG, HTC or Samsung, RIM is a North American company, I would still prefer RIM and I want RIM to develop their own OS. Android and Apple-iOS have lots of drawbacks and problems, as a consumer I want more options.
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Three turkeys do not make an eagle.
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You may have heard of this new startup, really shaking up the market these days... Goes by the cutesy name of "Apple"? Straight out of Cupertino, you don't get much more North American than that.
Not to mention that Microsoft and Google also come from the US... And for the record, your Crackberry came from Malaysia, which last time I checked didn't recently become a Canadian province.
What's a 'North American' phone? (Score:2)
> What is the distinguishing feature? Unlike LG, HTC or Samsung, RIM is a North American company, I would still prefer RIM and I want RIM to develop their own OS. Android and Apple-iOS have lots of drawbacks and problems, as a consumer I want more options.
If that's your criteria (being North American), then you can by Mot as well. It's owned by Google. If enough people thought like you, Palm would have been a success.
Incidentally, how do you define 'North American' (or for that matter American)? Samsung, HTC and LG have Android on their phones, not some native Korean or Chinese OS. Or conversely, those phones are manufactured in China, but so for that matter is Mot, Nokia, Sony-Ericsson and others. In fact, using this criteria, one can question whethe
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I know for sure there is manufacturing in Waterloo, Ontario. I know a few people who worked in manufacturing for RIM.
Also, my former neighbour was in support. There is a large community in Waterloo dependant on RIM.
They not only employ thousands, they also own much of the real-estate and lease to many businesses which make up a sizable number
My current torch is also made in Mexico - which is North American-ish.
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Most BlackBerries are made in Mexico, Canada, or Europe...
If RIM are paying Canadian or Western European wages for assembly workets instead of Chinese, no wonder they're not making as much money as Apple.
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RIM is a North American company
In the time of the PATRIOT act this would be a disadvantage. Of course RIM is Canadian, which is a little better.
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There's no particular reason to for them to have to change how the base Android OS works if they went with it. RIM's strength is, was, and if they survive will be their security and administration model. The reason Google will never offer an enterprise email that is "the same" is that Google is an advertising company and everybody had better remember that. However, RIM's email and messaging infrastructure was designed in such a way that even RIM couldn't tap it easily and nobody else could at all. That'
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You might not, but an enterprise with it's own BES or which has heavily vetted the crackberry might be very interested.
Re:Doing it wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
If RIM supplies a better enterprise email client / server package, then enterprises will buy it. Just like they used to.
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If RIM supplies a better enterprise email client / server package, then enterprises will buy it. Just like they used to.
In the same way that Microsoft obviously supplies the best non-mobile enterprise email client/server package due to their large market share?
The myth that the best quality product always wins out in a capitalist/free market * economy is palpable nonsense.
Yes, I know the libertarians will say that we don't have a free market system, and that it is the interference of government that has spoiled the beauty of pure capitalism. But that's even greater bollocks.
Re:Doing it wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. Layer your services on top of Android and be done with it. Why develop an OS, when a free one is there waiting for you to add to it.
Yeah, that way you can fragment development based not only on what the hardware manufacturer does to the version of Android shipped with the phone, but also fragment as time goes on with various versions of Android. :-/
The issue isn't that they didn't go with Android -- the issue is that there's no compatibility between their old OS and their new OS. Historically that kind of departure doesn't usually work out well.
An example of where this kind of transition works is the migration Apple went through between OS 9 and OS X. OS X shipped with an emulator, "OS Classic", to allow people to run OS 9 applications -- and sometime they later dropped support for this. They also shipped 'Rosetta' to simultaneously support PowerPC and Intel architecture -- and now they're dropping support for that, too. But during the transitions they supported applications, at least for a couple of years. With no similar "transition support", RIM is taking a big risk, and there's a good chance they're going to get burnt, because in terms of application support they're starting from scratch again.
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Why develop an OS, when a free one is there waiting for you to add to it.
Let's see... - on one side, you've got Apple - own OS + own hardware. On the other side, you'v got the army of "everybody else", Google's Android + own hardware. Now what possible difference could make on more addition to that Android soup ? I am glad RIM decided to forge it's own OS - that has the potential of making them a strong player in the smartphone contest. And what's event better - it's QNX based, which means - native apps, oh yeeeeaaah ! Take that, Java !
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What possible difference can they make by going with their own OS, though, other than increased development costs? i.e. what exact purpose is better served by building from scratch over building on Android?
As for "native", did you miss the mention of HTML5 in the story? Sure, they'll let you use native code outside of UI, but that is there in Android as well.
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Because Android is a laggy, buggy piece of trash that has horrible standby battery drain. Android is antiquated, a pre-iOS junkheap that should have been thrown away the moment iOS was first revealed. MSFT threw away Windows Mobile to develop WP7/8, Palm threw away Palm OS for webOS, RIM the old BB OS for the new QNX OS, and Nokia originally was transitioning away from Symbian for MeeGo. Google is the only one who decided to just rip off Apple as fast as possible by slapping on a touchscreen layer onto t
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Well for one thing the QNX kernel has capabilities in doing types of multitasking that might work better with distributed processing that the Linux kernel (which is ultimately designed around x86 type architectures) doesn't have. In theory there could be huge advantages for BB10. I don't believe that RIM has the technical excellence to pull this off at this point but QNX is a really interesting OS.
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Embrace Android, become a hardware power house.
yeah, just like... um... well I'm sure SOMEONE'S doing it.
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Yeah, they are just about the only company making profits on Android.
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I don't think this is a good plan. If they use Android, then they basically have 2 options:
A) Stick close to the reference design, and be just another Android phone manufacturer. Relinquish control over future software development to Google. Then they struggle to compete and differentiate themselves from other Android manufacturers-- i.e. "Why do I buy this RIM phone instead of the Samsung phone with the same features?"
B) Go their own way and deviate widely from the reference design. Run the risk that
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How this got modded up is the same reason RIM is failing. They sold a platform that runs only signed code and supports full encryption to users/investors who would rather have a bubble leveling application then trusted applications.
Nobody develops for RIM because it is extremely difficult to do things like change UI elements, send SMS, place calls, use the wifi, bluetooth or camera and make the device cool... the same reasons it's not a target for malware and that many carriers love blackberries.
If RIM ran
Could be worse (Score:1)
Could be staking their dwindling future on windows phones.
But if they don't innovate (read port to android and ditch the hardware business) they're doomed.
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Could be staking their dwindling future on windows phones.
But if they don't innovate (read port to android and ditch the hardware business) they're doomed.
If they port to Android and ditch the hardware business they're still doomed.
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It's not like Android is making much money either - Google makes $2 per phone, Apple $575 [slashdot.org].
And with the way that the Android platform has already fragmented, it's going to go the way of Linux on the desktop.
Want to buy an Android phone? Good luck comparing features, and figuring out if your manufacturer will even be offering updates 6 months from now.
All Android did was kill off Apple's other competitors, leaving the top - and all the profits- to Apple. RIM is just one more victim.
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You also can't compare android to an iPad - which is why Amazon sells more Kindle tablets than all the other Android makers combined.
In other words, there's the iPad, the Kindle, and "everybody else", which explains why manufacturers are abandoning the tablet market as unprofitable. Only the iPad can command iPad prices from the masses ... because everything else really is a crappy, poorly-supported wanna-be knock-off.
But back on-topic - there is no way in H*** that RIM is going to survive - not by sw
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which explains why manufacturers are abandoning the tablet market as unprofitable.
Who exactly is leaving the tablet market? All companies that have made Android tablets so far have announced new models.
Only the iPad can command iPad prices from the masses ... because everything else really is a crappy, poorly-supported wanna-be knock-off.
Did you even see Asus Transformer?
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How much did HP lose on their touchpad because of the "race to the bottom" for all non-iPad tablets? A billion is still a lot of money.
Dell abanoned their "Streak" Android tablet [pcworld.com], and is now concentrating on Windows tablets.
Is the Transformer nice? Sure - but the sales numbers tell a different story - people who look at it still end up buying an iPad instead. If they need a real keypad plus portability, they buy a laptop
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Dell abanoned their "Streak" Android tablet, and is now concentrating on Windows tablets.
Anyone else? Because one manufacturer out of a dozen is not exactly consistent with the bleak picture that you've pained in your original post, where it sounded like everyone, or at least most companies, are leaving the market. But they don't, because even the relatively small slice they end up with after Apple takes away theirs, is still large enough to turn a decent profit.
Is the Transformer nice? Sure - but the sales numbers tell a different story - people who look at it still end up buying an iPad instead.
That does not follow. Most people who buy iPad, don't even look at anything else before doing that.
If they need a real keypad plus portability, they buy a laptop
You miss the point of Transformer.
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When that "one manufacturer" (two actually - both Dell and HP) are the #1 and #2 computer vendors in the world, it means a LOT.
The market is Apple iPad at the high end, Amazon Kindle at the low end, and everyone else trying to compete for the scraps that are left, which basically means the price pressure is such that they will never be able to "make it up in volume."
Google screwed up. They should have bought Motorola before releasing Android, and made it exclusively for Motorola. You'd have Googlero
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I decided I wanted an Asus Transformer Prime.
It was a pain in the ass to get one. I wound up getting the tablet from Office Depot and the keyboard from Best Buy. And it took a month to get the tablet, and another week for the keyboard.
I might believe poor sales figures if the damned thing wasn't still selling out all over the place. Obviously, Asus is selling them as fast as they make them.
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Also, the 2,000 pre-orders (included in the 82,000 figure) were cancelled by Amazon.
A friend asked me what tablets to look at, and I suggested the Transformer, as well as looking at the iPad and laptops. She ended up buyting an iPad and a laptop because, no matter how you put it, tablets suck for
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In other words, there's the iPad, the Kindle, and "everybody else"
And just to throw this in there, I think we've seen this is the standard thing in technology. For years, in the desktop OS market, there's been "Microsoft, Apple, and everyone else." In servers, there's been "Microsoft, Linux, and everyone else." In mobile phones, for a while there was "Palm, Blackberry, and everyone else," and then it was becoming "Blackberry, Windows, and everyone else," before jumping to "Apple, Android, and everyone else."
I think that the masses only have enough room in their brains
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The BoM of an iPhone is $180. Apple's margins on the device are massive. That's true for all manufacturers that sell their phones at retail.
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Could be staking their dwindling future on windows phones.
Seriously, I wonder what the prospects for the windows phone are. My starting assumption is that Microsoft knows they need to succeed in the smart phone game and that this would be a good thing to blow their cash hoard on unless they want to stay a PC software company. So I assume they are going to make some company succeed but may have not made up their minds which.
The obvious choice is Nokia's headlong commitment to Windows phones. Clearly a willing partner with the manufacturing, distribution and har
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. My starting assumption is that Microsoft knows they need to succeed in the smart phone game and that this would be a good thing to blow their cash hoard on unless they want to stay a PC software company. So I assume they are going to make some company succeed but may have not made up their minds which.
You are assuming wrong. The board discussed this something like about 18mo back. While they are willing to lose a little on this market they are not going to focus on this market as a core strategic dire
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but if their marketshare exceeds Windows Phone in a reasonable time frame, I will piss my pants laughing. I guess Nokia shareholders will piss their pants for other reasons however.
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Blackberry, on the other hand still has some "street cred" and if RIM can make a polished/quality product and get enough developers/apps on board (big IFs!) then they might still have a chance of retaining some market share.
Having a market with 10000000 android apps is highly overrat
WebOS versus Android Round 2, Fight! (Score:4, Insightful)
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In what world is Microsoft pushing Windows Phones? They've got the most pathetic lineup of any platform. A grand total of one (1) phone on Verizon's network.
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That's how we know your world is limited to Verizon. In ours, there are also AT&T and T-Mobile, who have fairly popular Windows Phone models. Not to mention other countries out there because who cares about them anyway.
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Coincidentally, the largest company is having very public second thoughts about Windows Phone.
But it's an iPhone, after all. (Score:1)
n/t
Curious about their future (Score:2)
I myself am quite happy with my Blackberry and I'm really curious what they will bring to the table.
I really think they should diversify their hardware, bring some qwerty models, like the Curve, Bold and Torch. But also full touchsreen devices, with small screens to bigger screens. Like 3,2" and 3,7" and 4,3" for example.
I do think they are still interesting for developers. They will have their own platform. But also Qt support, which might bring in a lot of old Nokia developers. They also support Android,
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No! Diversifying is the worst idea! One phone, one model, keep it simple. Android is too fractured, iPhone has one model, with a service pack released about every 9 months. Apple success is because of the simplicity, one model with slight hardware variations over the course of what like 5 years? Which means most apps on the 3GS works on the 4S. OS5 apps don't always work well with OS6, and wont even run on OS7. I love my Blackberry (Have the Torch 8910, wish I had a Bold 9900...) and my Playbooks! OS2 is am
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going the way of WebOS? (Score:2)
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Then there's no future for RIM (Score:1)
"RIM's Future Hangs On Developer Support For 'New BlackBerry'"
I had a "quad band" (?) BlackBerry for years and kinda liked it's "full" keyboard to SMS.
But I've developped for the BlackBerry which you *could* more or less program in Java but it was nonsense. They did definitely alienate the developers. If Java wasn't an option (it is now for Android btw ; ) then they should have made that clearer. It was by far the most buggy JVM of all the phones (and that's not a compliment, some of them were really te
Bad Ecosystem = Business Failure (Score:3, Interesting)
In comparison, the Android development environment "just works". Toss Eclipse on Ubuntu, do a couple add-ins, and you are up and running in an hour or two. Very very low cost to develop an application. Clear instructions on what you need to do to get on the market. Amazon was pretty simple as well.
The banks and government business is the only thing keeping RIM afloat, and that can last a little while, but its a bad business model. RIM deserves to die.
Have that resume ready, RIM employees. You are going to need it soon.
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Are you talking about current Blackberry development system? Because that's the bit they're (very sensibly) leaving behind.
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For me, native Android dev has (over the past few years) been one headache after another and only recently has it started to approach being in any way user-friendly (though i still use command line tools and makefiles to build native code
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"...can RIM have an adequate catalog of apps?" (Score:5, Insightful)
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question (Score:2)
What does "real time kernel" mean?
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What does "real time kernel" mean?
It means that the OS can make guarantees about the time of response to events (usually external inputs).
This is very important for things like antilock brake control systems, not so much for consumer electronics.
In this case, however, it's helpful because we can be assured that Blackberry OS Version 10 will tank within a guaranteed limited time.
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Cute answer. The importance of an RTOS for consumer electronics is responsiveness. Most OSes are optimized to do the most work on a given quantity of hardware. If however you optimize for responsiveness the system "feels" faster even though top of the line apps won't run. You reduce total productive capacity of the hardware but in exchange end user satisfaction skyrockets.
This used to be one of the core differences between Windows Desktop and Windows Server how the kernel was tweaked. And in the case
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Nobody complains that these platforms are not responsive.
Actually they do all the time. The complain about battery life which under an RTOS could be much longer since subsystems can boot during the runtime unlike traditional kernels where the hardware is generally expected to be fully booted before the OS even starts. Application authors complain about how difficult it is to get smooth graphics. End users complain about their phones freezing. Public safety people complain about distraction factors.
Yes
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Well, if it's 'hard' Real Time, It means that the kernel is designed to give certain guarantees for responsiveness. An example could be that a process that requests it can be certain that it gets a timeslice every certain number of milliseconds either most of the time (for a 'soft' RTOS) or completely deterministically (for a 'hard' RTOS).
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Thank you for the answer. Can you give me an example of a non-RTOS? I've having trouble finding explanations of these things that I can understand via the google (but I'
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Can you give me an example of a non-RTOS? I've having trouble finding explanations of these things that I can understand via the google (but I'm not particularly bright about these things).
Let's see if I can give the nickel tour...
Standard Windows, Unix & Linux OS's are all non-RTOS.
An OS runs many processes that execute the programs and also take care of things in the background. Each process gets a timeslice, a share of the cpu. They often have to wait for an external event, such as disk or network i/o, and will queue up to wait for these events. A process is not guaranteed a constant response time for a given event, because higher priority processes or queueing may take your slice.
A pr
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Most OSes are non-RTOSes. Windows, MacOS X, Linux*, Android, iOS.
Basically, a process tells the kernel 'Look, I *need* a slice of CPU time at this interval.' A realtime OS goes 'Okay, here you go.' A non-realtime OS goes 'Pfft, whatever. I'll see what I can do, but don't get your hopes up.'
(* Standard Linux-related qualifier: There is, of course, a real-time variant of Linux, but most machines don't use that kernel.)
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Sorry, RIM... (Score:5, Informative)
As a (former) Blackberry developer, I've decided that I will be doing no more development for their platforms. They pissed away any goodwill I had for them by their crappy tools, crappy support and their ridiculous policies. As an example, in order to become a development partner, which is the ONLY way to get real support from them, you have to sign a license that basically gives RIM rights to use any of your source code that you develop for their platform. Or typically, if you tried to discuss a problem on their support forums, they would allow developers to spend weeks or months trying to figure out a problem before stepping in and say, "Oh, ya, we know about this. It's on our internal bug tracking system," and then close the discussion to new posts. This was often for bugs that had been around for several major API versions, or even from the very FIRST API version.
Fighting through the mess seemed like it was worth it when it seemed like everybody in the market for the software I was developing had a Blackberry, but now that it's dropped down to almost zero, you want me to invest my time and money into a brand new platform? No, thanks. At this point, I'm content to see you slip beneath the waves and to try to forget you exist. Goodbye.
RIM is so dead (Score:2)
RIM is so dead that posting on this story isn't worth anyone's time.
Open source... (Score:1)
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This would be nice, but what's in it for RIM?
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Of QNX, maybe. But a Hail-Mary open sourcing pass doesn't assure a company's future, e.g. Sun. And it costs money to do, so there's economic incentive to let the codebase rot. I wish this weren't the case, but it is.
What's in it for RIM?
Then they are going to die... (Score:1)
Legitimate question... (Score:2)
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I just got the $200 model of Playbook for myself. I thought it had better hardware than the $200 Android tablets (camera, hdmi connection), less cost than an iPad and is easier to carry in a pocket for reading and so on. The software selection got a lot better through the Android compatability.
-Gareth
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In all honesty, I wouldn't say the Playbook is a better choice.
I bought one for the wife for Christmas. It locks up, hangs, freezes, hasn't got all that many apps she's interested in, and generally seems a bit more of a nuisance than it ought to be. It doesn't always want to see the wifi, and every now and then locks up so badly she just puts it on to charge and walks away from it.
I'm actually embarrassed ev
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A lot of the complaints are from miscreants/malcontents.
So all reviews are positive, so long as you exclude those users who aren't happy?
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So I'm making an app, i can chose to develop for iOS.... or the BB10?
Seriously, why would i spent any time and resources on that platform, when I could just target iOS, and take advantage of the app store and the entire ecosystem that doesn't exist for the BB10?
Because everyone else is writing for iOS, and you'd have a lot less competition on the BB10 platform?
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So you're suggesting that desktop software developers should develop for Linux instead of Windows? It is hard to overstate the absurdity of that statement.
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The problem with Linux desktop software was that the people drawn to the Linux desktop didn't want to buy applications. There were companies that made money on the Mac back when it has 2-5% marketshare.
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All fine and good. No one is suggesting that you can't make money on Linux or the Mac. I am not even suggesting that people won't make money coding for BB10. Hell, I will go as far as to say that people that specifically target deficiencies in BB10 may do well.
My reply was specifically about the idea that you should target low adoption platforms before high adoption ones "because there is less competition". It is nonsense, and that is what I wanted to illustrate with my analogy.
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I understand that, and I think the analogy is flawed. Less competition, especially for a mediocre product can be critical in terms of sales. A market 50x as large with 50x as much competition will on average be worse to enter into with a new product because by random chance alone you'll have competitors who have a substantially better product already present. Microsoft office basically sucks the oxygen out of the office suite for windows even though the windows market is massive. That's why OpenOffice's
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I couldn't agree more. I even stated as much.
If you are targeting a market that is very crowded on one platform and very open on another much smaller platform then it MAY be better to target the smaller one. Your office example is an excellent example of this.
A second scenario where the smaller platform may be better is for highly skewed demographics or usage patterns. For instance if I were developing a LOB app BB7 may very well be the best place to start. It would be worth investigating at the very le
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Because everything exist on the iPhone and everything that does not exist get cloned as soon as your app reaches the store. It used to be that you could have an original idea and develop it (fun), now even before you start you see 10 implementations already in the store, that kills the fun right there.
It is still good to develop for the iPhone because of the incredible amount of resources you have. However, that is a harsh and very competitive environment. If you are not coding to become rich or create a
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Why would I write a tablet app for enterprise customers? Where's the market I'm going to get money from? And even if it's there, would I get more money from that over writing, say, a decent game for iOS?
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Lots of enterprises are moving towards tablets. They are becoming standard in medicine. Salesforces and starting to use them because of instant on features. They are moving heavily towards retail.
And enterprise customers don't use the app store they use an enterprise phone management system to distribute apps.
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Yep. Specifically, iPad. There's iPad and then there's, er, nothing else.
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Well yeah. At this poing Apple has both a software and a hardware advantage. The point was that if RIM were able to create a hardware advantage then it would still be possible....
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Maybe. But true nonetheless.
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I just read the headline and thought "RIM is so fucked." I read "There's very little or no compatibility between the old and new operating systems. Existing apps can't be carried forward to QNX and BB 10." and thought "they're not developing now, why are they going to bother?" I'm hoping RIM will last until I've actually finished paying for my BlackBerry 9300 ...