RIM Collapse Beginning? 305
jfruhlinger writes "After the announcement of disappointing BlackBerry sales last quarter, RIM shares started to plummet. Blogger Chris Nerney wonders if this isn't the beginning of the company's death spiral, with the exodus away from RIM's BlackBerry platform too far along to stop and the company too small to compete with huge rivals like Apple and Google."
Stability (Score:4, Interesting)
Meanwhile, RIM clings to their dying subscription-based revenue model and does nothing to address any of the stability concerns on their phones. We have C-level executives today using brand new Blackberries that lock up or fail to sync on a daily basis - and the best help our Email guys can offer is for them to remove the battery for a few seconds before powering the phone back on.
Seriously RIM, you have the most mature EMail-centric phone platform on the planet, but your phones are lagging behind the much younger competition in critical areas like stability. I guess that's why we're recommending Android or iPhone to all of our business users with phones up for replacement..
I don't know (Score:3, Interesting)
My impression is that RIM phones are kinda like Jags. You buy them to 'show off' that you're a buisinessy type.
You'd expect a hot-shot businessman to use serious phones like Blackberries. You don't expect him to mingle with the rest of us and our androids or iOSes.
BB had been technologically backwards for ages. They barely have any touchscreen devices (its 2011 people), and the app store is more 'serious'.
So I don't know, I think RIM was dying for ages. Just that its a 'show off' phone, so its aimed at people who want to look 'fessional but don't know jack about technology. So lots of people.
Time to trademark the "DroidBerry" (Score:3, Interesting)
Sooner or later, RIM will have to ditch BlackBerry for DroidBerry.
Wouldn't be surprised (Score:4, Interesting)
Several years back I worked on some software for the Blackberry (pre-Pearl). Over the past couple of months I've written software for the Playbook as part of their runup to release. The experience was just as shoddy both times. Just getting started on a project is an exercise in intuition and quite the struggle. Tooling is spread across multiple archives; some of it is/was windows-only; documentation is poor or misleading.
I remember my former CEO standing in my office nearly 7 years ago with myself and a colleague, saying "Hey, I have [some senior RIM guy] on the line... Anything you want to say to him?" Both myself and my colleague looked at each other, then said "Tell him RIM treats developers like crap. We need better tools."
Not the most intelligent thing to say, I guess, but it was a casual conversation and we were both pretty frustrated. Of course, the RIM guy had no response.
RIM's attitude towards developers only works in an environment where they are the only game in town. They aren't anymore, and their enterprise customers' resistance to change is the only reason they haven't already crashed and burned.
Re:Recent marketing (Score:4, Interesting)
Same here in the UK. Blackberries seem to be in the phones of the young and trendy (i.e. not me ;-)). I see plenty of cool kids with them and very few with iPhones. The iPhones seem to be in the hands of rich students or middle-aged people who wish they were still cool.