RIM Firing (Nearly) Everybody 440
itwbennett writes "Research in Motion (RIM) reported grim Q4 results Thursday and announced sweeping personnel changes. Leading the parade of departing execs is Jim Balsillie, former co-CEO of the company, who has given up his board seat. David Yach, who has been CTO of software for the company for 13 years, is retiring. And Jim Rowan, chief operating officer of global operations, who has been with the company for four years, is leaving to pursue other interests."
like palm (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:like palm (Score:5, Insightful)
Too true. This is a prime example of what happens when you fail to innovate in the face of a changing competitive landscape. Blackberry used to be the last word in mobile email, and while they remained very good at email, every other manufacturer caught up, and did far far more, while Blackberries, model after subtly different model, didn't expand their feature set at all. They introduced startling revelations of technology like replacing the trackball (which I didn't mind) with a laptop-style trackpad, which I couldn't stand, and they upped the resolution of their OS a bit. Everyone else offered bajillion megapixel cameras with a solid metric fucktonne of apps, and a proper, i.e. NOT WAP web browsing experience. But hey, Blackberry owners could still get their email, right? By about January last year, I'd say the only people buying Blackberries were people who already had Blackberries and had never tried anything else.
Re:like palm (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, it was primarily a business phone, but it didnt support good software APIs for gaming. Consequence? People would have to buy a second phone just for entertainment. They had a quite complete Java Stack, but wouldnt bother to implement not even JSR184 or OpenGL ES. And they had friggin' GPU phones!
Re:like palm (Score:4, Interesting)
People would have to buy a second phone just for entertainment.
The Blackberry was a business tool, just like a photocopier. Nobody complains about having to buy a game console because their photocopier can't play games.
The Blackberry was an effective business tool because it only had business-related functionality - so any company buying them didn't feel they were providing free toys for their employees, they were only providing a necessary tool. Unfortunately now everyone wants the latest/shiniest/coolest gadget, not just a business phone.
Re:like palm (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that's very naive. Its not because people want shiny that RIM is in the dumpster. Its because "business phones" really needed to be able to do everything that the "non business phones" do too. Their web browser sucked, and they didn't do a good job making a phone ( storm sucked) with a decent screen to view more complex documents and emails. A proper business phone is a consumer phone PLUS additional security features. Not a consumer phone MINUS some usability features.
Re:like palm (Score:5, Funny)
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Screw that, every employee with a phone should be able to play Angry Birds during their lunch hour, or after work or on weekends. A good phone will do that, plus work well for their business uses. Only a shitty phone maker would ask their customers to buy and carry around a second phone to do such things.
Re:like palm (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that's very naive. Its not because people want shiny that RIM is in the dumpster. Its because "business phones" really needed to be able to do everything that the "non business phones" do too.....
Amen. That Blackberry is automatically competing against everyone's personal cellphone. A job I had several years ago they provided their tech staff with Blackberries, but I refused to use/carry it. Why? I already had a cell phone, which I still needed to carry since the rest of the world uses it to call me, and it was smaller (the Blackberry had a permanent keyboard making too big to fit in the pocket), and did more. So I changed my contact info to my personal cell phone.
When a product is sufficiently uncompelling that you don't want to use it even when they give it to you free, that product has a long term problem.
Re:like palm (Score:5, Insightful)
Dumbphones compete against land-line telephones and VOIP home phones largely for the business of the elderly.
Among the rest of us, smartphones compete with smartphones. When the original iPhone came out, Blackberry never responded (and still has not, 5 years later) and that's why they are suffering.
It's like they're trying to sell us laptops without wifi. Well, it's a business tool, so it'll always be used in our narrow use case, right?
Re:business tool, just like a photocopier (Score:5, Insightful)
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If work gives you a phone, the company will often allow leeway for you to use it as your primary cell phone even for personal use. It is a perk if you are going to be on call for 24 hours a day, you might as well not have to pay for cell service. You can use your work phone for some personal use too.
So the ability to play games, browse a better web, and do non-business things too really made alternatives more attractive.
For the longest time, the Blackberry while
Re:like palm (Score:4, Insightful)
So the ability to play games, browse a better web, and do non-business things too really made alternatives more attractive.
Several years ago I first heard the argument that BlackBerry was getting its brand poisoned a bit because IT administrators were disabling most of the features that shipped on the phones (for security reasons, or whatever). So a large percentage of users didn't even know you could load third party apps or browse the web on it (though the web browser sucked until BB 6 shipped in 2010), and so the phones seemed much less compelling to get for personal use. Of course that's not the whole story of BlackBerry's decline, but it's an interesting point nonetheless.
Re:like palm (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately now everyone wants the latest/shiniest/coolest gadget, not just a business phone.
It was a decent phone, I suppose. And it was fantastic for text emails.
But other phones came along that simply outclassed it and absorbed it's capability into their feature sets.
It's like what happened to the alphanumeric pager companies once SMS came along.
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This is pretty far off base. RIM was working hard to try to create a consumer smartphone market starting from around 2004. Their first attempt at a 'candy bar' form factor smartphone was crap (7100 series), but the Pearl (8100 series) released in mid-2006 was quite solid for the day and a good design for trying to wean people off of traditional 'feature' phones, which were cheaper but much less capable. The consumer market didn't really take off until the first iPhone was released in June 2007, and RIM's co
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That's like saying "if you didn't care about the wheels and the engine" when talking about a car.
LOL, that's ridiculous! The web-browser is not what defines a smartphone, neither is the touch-screen! That's perfectly absurd.
Really, capacitive touch-screens like the iPhone uses are absolutely wretched for doing anything beyond scrolling through a webpage or tapping really big targets. The best you can say about tying on one is "you get used to it" Horrible.
Of course, RIM offers touch-only devices and one of the best mobile browsers on the market. In short, they've caught up already. Their next lin
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It's not unfortunate at all. Why would you want to carry around two phones all the time? That's utterly stupid. Do you think that people who use a phone for work email shouldn't be able to play games at all?
You don't need the photocopier to play games, because you don't play games in the office (hopefully). Instead, you go home and play games there on your own time. Or, if you have a home office, you can play games on your PC, which plays games just fine (which is why your analogy sucks).
But people don
Re:like palm (Score:4, Insightful)
I think 80% of Blackberries keep themselves out of the trash can because some corporate policies haven't yet caught up to BOYD.
Re:like palm (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the day, when pagers were still pretty hip and running from AAA batteries wasn't yet somewhat deviant for a mobile device, RIM's ability to shove email onto handsets was pretty serious business. Trouble is, as team silicon advanced, the "Um, just run an IMAP or Activesync client, like a real computer, y'know?" solution became viable. Harder on the battery and the data plan; but trivially interoperable with everything already set up for real computers to get email.
Windows Mobile should have been RIM's wake-up call: UX was pretty dismal; but it was a more or less architecturally successful implementation of 'well, just build the computer smaller!' school of mobile design. Once Apple came along and dealt with the UX problem... Game over man, game over.
Palm went down a somewhat similar road: under the assumption that mobile devices would be highly power constrained and very infrequently connected, their 'conduit/sync' system was crazy elegant, and they managed to shove some pretty impressive capability into gizmos with weedy little ColdFire CPUs and absurdly small slices of RAM. Again, though, team silicon marched on, and it became possible to just shove a computer into a smaller box. Microsoft's attempt was a usability disaster, which gave Palm some extra time to live; but their attempts to scale classic PalmOS up to take advantage of more powerful hardware and more frequent connectivity never really came to much.
Re:like palm (Score:5, Insightful)
well, i agree with your postting, but i dont think you're right on what RIM's main problem is/was.
RIM suffered from executive indecision. they just couldn't agree on what the playbook should be like, what features it should sport. Aim to sweep the young adults market or focus on pleasing its already existing business clientele. Ultimately they went for middle ground and they failed because 1. Their first version arrived almost at the same time as the ipad SECOND generation arrived, almost withing the same month. and 2. they failed because the device isn't competitive enough for the ipad, so forget mass consumer market and the device failed to meet the business clientele market and they failed there too.
Mostly, i would wager that RIM would have made it out alive if they had entered the race within the same month or two as the first ipad. people wouldn't have had expectations of what a proper tablet should be and mass consumer market could have been swayed either way. i think ipad still would have come out ahead, but perhaps RIM wouldn't have bitten the dust so hard.
There is still hope for RIM and their playbook if they decide to remain in the tablet business. It remains the only tablet certified with the FIPS-140-2 (encryption) standard, and therefore makes it the best tablet for business models. But they got to screw their heads tight and stop trying to get both markets. Their new playbook 2.0 os has potential, the support for android as well. modifying their Blackberry enterprises software (bes) to support android, blackberry and itunes is a move that very well could save them.
RIM's not done yet, but clearly their boat is heading toward the niagara falls (they're canadians, get it?? :p) so they need to make their next decisions right.
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Yup. They should talk to the PHBs - the guys they sold their last generation of products to. Forget being the best platform to watch movies or listen to music. Figure out how to make it trivial to do collaboration on documents, read email without spending 30 mins booting up your laptop and connecting to the VPN, and so on. Stick a VGA out onto it that works with any video projector built since 1995, and so on.
Give it a slick client that connects to SharePoint and makes document checkin/out, editing, col
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Because of the way data plans are sold. No one is making much money selling tablets with data. That's something that RIM got right from the start. The problem of course is the carriers want to sell two plans and RIM isn't in a position to dictate to carriers anymore.
Re:like palm (Score:4, Insightful)
I see your point, but I don't agree with you (at all)
Those protocols were design for computing power lower than a calculators'. They would have run on pretty much anything. What RIM did was construct a whole network to provide secure communications to the users of their phones, while having a great UI for it (at the time), and that was revolutionary. It was never that you couldn't get e-mail on phones, just they went the extra mile. They were what other players aspired to be...
On the other hand, now they are not doing it. Pretty much everything RIM has done in the past few years has been trying to catch up, and when they do, their competitors are already miles ahead.
The only way RIM will ever reach the pack is if they skip trying to develop everything from scratch and just add their ideas to Android (Nokia is living proof that windows mobile 7 will not sell, even if you do great handsets). With it they can take advantage of everything Android already does and differentiate themselves by doing some of the things better (much like they did in the past).
Re:like palm (Score:5, Interesting)
My whole point is that RIM developed a (to the best of my knowledge) uniquely parsimonious and full featured mechanism for delivering email to power and computationally constrained clients. The battery life and minimal specs of blackberry handsets attests to this.
The problem for them(as it was for Palm) is that it has become possible to just throw power at the problem(in the sense that you can afford the SoC and squeeze just about one waking day out of the battery), which leads to devices that are capable of things that only full mobile computers are capable of and capable of largely adequately emulating the features of more parsimonious devices.
For whatever reason, it has proven to be quite difficult to take the historically platform-constrained system and augment it to take advantage of more powerful hardware(both Palm and RIM tacked on some features to their existing OSes, with limited success; but ended up grabbing an entirely new operating system and attempting to move to that. We now know that Palm did a good job; but not fast enough to save themselves. Jury is still out on RIM); but it is comparatively trivial(although deeply inelegant and wasteful) for a less platform constrained system to brute-force most of the features of a more carefully designed system.
Re:like palm (Score:4, Interesting)
Wrong. Google C2DM is extremely efficient, and can be used for multiple purposes in addition to providing the genuine push email you claim that only BlackBerry has.
Now, Android with an Exchange server... that's a different story.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:like palm (Score:4)
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The site is awful, one of the worst I've ever used. So I don't know what you're talking about.
Re:like palm (Score:5, Insightful)
I would say this is an example of "Lead, follow, or you'll be pushed out of the way."
The real story here, the story that most people on Slashdot don't like, is how Apple reinvented the smartphone market. Blackberry was king of a world where smartphones were for self-important middle-managers. Smartphones were annoying, the didn't work very well, and they weren't useful for very much anyway. Yes, you could browse the web, but only on this little mobile-only browser that didn't display web pages the same way as your computer. Yes, you could respond to email, but email. Yes, you could theoretically install a 3rd party app, but there selection of 3rd party apps that weren't complete junk were awfully limited.
And then Apple came along with the iPhone, and the mobile industry shuddered. You had a phone that rarely crashed, was easy to use, and did many of the things that only full computers used to do. Email could be setup to use normal mail protocols. Web pages looked like web pages. You could sync your music and listen to it as easily as you could on a high-end dedicate music player.
Apple was leading the way, and most of the cell phone industry was smart enough to follow. You got Android phones in response, and Microsoft developed a better version of their mobile OS. RIM... did nothing. And now, as a result of their inaction, they're being pushed aside.
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That's not true. RIM wasn't doing nothing. RIM was doing all sorts of truly innovative stuff for the large enterprise market that Android and Apple are nowhere near close to having. But RIM did not develop the client connections nor the large consulting group required to get these server products actually implemented. So RIM had really cool technology that didn't get implemented.
If businesses were using the full RIM solution RIM phones would have fully integrated universal communication suites while App
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I'm not begging the question. You claimed that RIM had developed innovative features for large enterprises that Android and iOS can't match. I'm challenging you to name them.
Because in my experience, I've talked to many people who claim that Blackberry/BES is a technically superior platform, but when you ask them why, most of them can't give examples or explanations. The few times that I have gotten an answer, it's something like, "Well I know that you can change this obscure security setting I've never
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Yes, I'd concede that to be a nice feature with the potential to be genuinely useful. Still, with all the companies that I've supported Blackberries for, exactly none of them used that feature.
I've worked for quite a few companies, big and small. Three of those companies had more than 300 employees. One of them had a few thousand. All three had internal BES servers (though I've supported BES servers outside of those 3). Do you know what features those 3 companies used? Push email, push contacts, push
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I'm not saying that the iPhone was perfect, but it certainly made a drastic change in the smartphone market. Unless you simply weren't aware of smartphones in 2006, it's impossible to look a the phones that existed before and the phones that were developed afterwards and not admit that cell phone manufacturers completely changed their strategy specifically to compete with the iPhone.
In 2005, the hot new phone was the Motorola Q. Do you remember what that looked like? If not, go Google the Motorola Q and
You know it's too late when... (Score:2)
I figure by now, if you're still working for RIM, you're boned.
The time to leave was 3 years ago, and not when the big boys are lined up at the hatches with golden parachutes strapped to their backs.
(All I can say is, I'm damned glad I turned down an offer from RIM two years back as an email admin... a part of me always regretted that a little. Not anymore. Now if only I can get my employer to dump this crappy little BB Curve and get me a real phone...)
Re:like palm (Score:5, Insightful)
Palm innovated its ass off with webOS. It failed anyway, but not because of that.
Re:like palm (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, that was after a long stagnation. And the disruption was so major that there was little connection between the old business and the new. A customer with a Treo or Palm V probably had the same shock switching to an iPhone or a Palm Pre.
Also, webOS came after the iPhone. That makes it less innovative, since most of the differences between an old Pam were pioneered by the iPhone:
- get rid of pen, use fingers
- capacitive multi touch makes keyboard less needed, so get rid of it.
- get modern OS and not 16/32 bit kludgy memory address space
- get real browser
- PDA swallows the phone and not the reverse
Personally, for me the Treo was the time when Palm failed to innovate. Notably, they rejected the low end. I remember seeing 100$ phones, 100$ Palms. But there was no 150$ Palm-phone, only a very expensive Treo.
So, in the end, I'd say Palm is really a company that failed to innovate in time. And note this is really a case of innovating and not inventing. If you look at my bullet list, nothing was really groundbreaking in 2000. So it's not that they were unlucky and the guys in the labs didn't have the "Eureka moment". It's that they didn't look at what was possible and put it together quickly enough.
That's really quite sad, Palm was a company that had understood some really important things about simplicity and focus on the core features.
Re:like palm (Score:5, Insightful)
either you innovate or you are out of business really soon
Or you innovate really well and run headlong into a ridiculous patent infringement lawsuit that soaks you for 2-3 years worth of your R&D budget, and then you have no choice but to stop innovating... The NTP shake-down of RIM pretty much directly marked the beginning of the end for them. It's a cautionary tale, really.
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Or you innovate really well and run headlong into a ridiculous patent infringement lawsuit
Amen to that. The patent minefield makes it impossible for a small company to compete. The ability to innovate has nothing to do with it, bringing an innovative product to market involves also using allot of other simple and obvious ideas that some other large company had the opportunity to patent since they've done it first. At that point your options are to either:
- patent your ideas, hide them really well, and expect some other large company inadvertently use it, then become a patent troll
Re:like palm (Score:5, Funny)
either you innovate or you are out of business really soon
Yeah, the only thing worse than a Rim job is a Palm job these days.
Titanic is sinking (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Titanic is sinking (Score:5, Funny)
I didn't know Francesco Schettino was in charge at RIM.
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Re:Titanic is sinking (Score:4, Informative)
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I wouldn't be very surprised to find out this wasn't voluntary. Being asked politely to resign so you don't have to be fired is pretty common in these types of jobs. Let's you save face and minimizes bad press for the company. The number and timing of these "resignations" makes me think they're polite firings by the board. CEOs still answer to someone, even they can be asked to leave.
Re:Titanic is sinking (Score:5, Interesting)
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There is a point lurking in there.
Most of RIM's employees are likely (until today) unaware that things were that bad, or dimly aware at best. They don't read the tech news, much less keep up with the industry. Hell, I bet RIM is *still* hiring right now.
It's not that they're forced to stay, it's that they don't know any better, and won't until a month or two from now. That'll be when the PR-spun "re-org" didn't fix anything, and the layoffs really begin.
Re:Titanic is sinking (Score:5, Insightful)
They are working for a Tech company. If they don't keep up with the news, they are idiots who deserve to wake-up to a bankrupt company.
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Pass out the golden parachutes (Score:2)
Now the question is who will buy the brand, patents and customers.
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Brand : Worthless ...
Customers : Leaving in droves, and no reason to stay now
Patents : the only asset they have left to strip
Misleading title (Score:5, Informative)
The title of this story is misleading.
There is nothing about firing in the source article.
Re:Misleading title (Score:5, Informative)
Also it is just the executive level is leaving. The headline seems to imply the whole company is shutting down, which is not the case.
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just wait a few more years
i sit near our sales people and a little while ago one of them made a joke about how a prospective customer is one of the 5 people in NYC who still uses a blackberry
Re:Misleading title (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if you're in the board room your attitude is that the workers don't matter any more than the machinery. To the 1%, only the 1% matter.
Re:Misleading title (Score:5, Funny)
From the few lines at the end of TFA, something like "Rats abandoning ship after having chewing through own hull" sounds more appropriate.
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They are actually getting rid of the real dead-weight, is that possible?
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The title of this story is misleading.
There is nothing about firing in the source article.
"Retiring" or "Leaving to pursue other interests" in corporate world usually means pushed out or fired.
Crackberry Perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
Looks like Thorsten is actually being the CEO now. Might get worse before it get's better. I have faith (mostly because not much else is left)!
Incidentally (Score:5, Interesting)
I got issued a Blackberry Bold for work yesterday and so far I've been incredibly impressed and actually like it more than my Android phone. It's something I never thought I'd get into but the physical format and the UI made pretty good sense to me (unlike android which feels disorganized/non-intuitive in a few places).
Where I think RIM has really failed is in regards to creating a culture around their devices outside of the workplace. Android has geeks and counterculture, Apple has the hipsters...and well everyone else. When I think of people with Blackberries I think of corporate culture and suit and ties - what young consumer wants to be a part of that?
Anywho - for my own selfish reasons I hope they continue (at least from my first impression) making quality devices and figure out how to market themselves outside of the enterprise.
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Don't forget teen girls who send 765 messages per day.
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Re:Incidentally (Score:5, Interesting)
I've got both a Blackberry Curve 9360 (my work phone) and an HTC Android... and I detest using my Blackberry. The UI is terrible... really terrible. The call quality (on the exact same provider as my Android) is atrocious to say the least - which is a much bigger issue than an annoying UI. Trying to read an email, type an email, send an email is an exercise in annoyance and frustration, swiping that stupid track spot and invariably having to back-track all the time.. Trying to dial a phone number... or worse, remember which button it is to hang up the call instead of leaving the call open which I always seem to do first.... every single call.
Basically my Blackberry sits on my desk in standby because I have to have it there... but if I want to do anything "real" I use my Android which works very very very well.
I'm not the only one that feels this way either. Amongst the staff where I work, exactly zero like the Blackberry phones (we all have slightly different models of either Bold or Curve and 2 people have the Touch).
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What exactly, in the realm of productivity, is easier on a Blackberry? I'd be interested in hearing some examples :)
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What exactly, in the realm of productivity, is easier on a Blackberry? I'd be interested in hearing some examples :)
Good points:
Bad points:
Re:Incidentally (Score:5, Insightful)
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. With a Blackberry, I often find myself scratching my head, but with an Android phone, even in the early versions, disarrayed and beta-ish as they were, and the current versions, laden as they are with manufacturer crapware like TouchWiz, I've never been left wondering "now where do I find that feature?"
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Come to the UK, BBM was touted as the organising system of the riots we had last year ... the teen market bought them because of this ...
But they are abandoning the consumer market ....
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Apple has the people who don't flash a second thought at dropping $1000 on something trivial
?
You do know that you can get a iPhone 3GS for $1, right?
Re:Incidentally (Score:4, Insightful)
You do know that you can get a iPhone 3GS for $1, right?
You mean, you can get an iPhone 3GS and a contract for $1 plus the contract fees, right?
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Engineering quality. (Score:5, Insightful)
RIM's failure is attributable, in no small part, to flat-out engineering laziness. For example, I recall their networking APIs made developers responsible for figuring out which transport mechanism (e.g., cellular, wi-fi) was available when they wanted a HTTP connection. That's nonsense. The developer just wants a connection. Irritants like these were systemic, and these make developing quality software nearly impossible. Granted, users don't see that part, but they do experience it indirectly as programmers are forced to reinvent solutions to simple tasks that ought to be high level abstractions.
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RIM's failure is attributable, in no small part, to flat-out engineering laziness.
You try taking a $612M hit directly to your bottom line and see how much free time you have left to be "industrious". RIMs mistake was in rolling over to NTP and expecting that they wouldn't be the only one that NTP brutally dominated in court (despite the technology on other platforms being pretty much identical). NTP had $615 million in the bank, why would they bother with any more time in court instead of just settle for some low-ball licensing deals? After that, competitors had such a huge advantage o
Sinking ship (Score:2)
I've heard of rats deserting a sinking ship but this is the first time I've heard of them being *cast overboard* as well!
I had a co-worker who left a great position at a good company to go work for RIM about a year ago. Everybody told him he was nuts. I get the feeling he's regretting that decision right about now.
Boggles mind to think about how they squandered (Score:5, Interesting)
Having only recently gotten into the smartphone game (July 2011), I didn't really know anything about the industry back when RIM/Blackberry was king.
But now, having read some about it... wow, what a waste. They basically had huge, fat, margins, essentially no competition in the smartphone arena, for almost five years - and freaking sat on it and did almost nothing. Meanwhile Apple and Google were in the lab inventing the future. Unbelievable.
Like most Canadians the story concerns me because what does it say about the country? I sometimes wonder - even if RIM had had a clue and tried to come up with something iPhone- or Android-like, could they have done it without the California engineer and developer community? They had the money, but could they have enticed the brilliant graduates of top American schools to move to Ontario? And I don't mean to say that Canadian engineers aren't good, but that Apple and Google have access to a global talent pool - did/does RIM? (Fascinating question: How much does snow and ice have to do with the fortunes of a mobile phone developer?)
It's a sad but interesting story all around. I hope they can turn things around but I don't see much chance of it at this point.
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RIM was only ever good for the enterprise market to give employees email on the go. first it was the execs and then the worker bees so they couldn't give the excuse that they couldn't work on the weekend because they didn't see the email.
the original iphone was overpriced but it looked cool. original androids were crappola. RIM had years to release a new product but they stuck to their BES/BIS investment. can't blame them. after spending billions of $$$ on a cloud computing solution before cloud was everywh
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i wouldn't count RIM's system as a "cloud computing solution" from everything i've ever read on the many many many outages they have had, their systems do not scale well at all.
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i wouldn't count RIM's system as a "cloud computing solution" from everything i've ever read on the many many many outages they have had, their systems do not scale well at all.
i wouldn't count RIM's system as a "cloud computing solution" from everything i've ever read on the many many many outages they have had, their systems do not scale well at all.
Who said they weren't full of thunderstorms? Yes RIM was in the cloud before it was cool, the outages were a regular and inevitable byproduct of a system that was only mildly redundant (basically just like all cloud solutions now) and since they will probably be gone to dust before the new cloud wave hits full speed, expect the same lessons to be re-learned all over again.
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Fascinating question: How much does snow and ice have to do with the fortunes of a mobile phone developer?
Well I don't know about mobile per se, but Boston is one of the larger innovation hubs outside California in the US (These days more biotech than straight IT stuff, but there's some of that too), and the climate isn't that different from Ontario. Vancouver also is in the same climate zone as Redmond more or less. I can't help but think that the rather beautiful SF Bay area climate doesn't hurt them though.
Re:Boggles mind to think about how they squandered (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Boggles mind to think about how they squandered (Score:5, Informative)
Having only recently gotten into the smartphone game (July 2011), I didn't really know anything about the industry back when RIM/Blackberry was king.
But now, having read some about it... wow, what a waste. They basically had huge, fat, margins, essentially no competition in the smartphone arena, for almost five years - and freaking sat on it and did almost nothing. Meanwhile Apple and Google were in the lab inventing the future. Unbelievable.
Like most Canadians the story concerns me because what does it say about the country?
Go back and read about the NTP settlement. RIM was brutalized in a way that's hard to compare. And those fat margins? Every penny went to paying the patent troll under the bridge so they could take their phones to market.
Re:Boggles mind to think about how they squandered (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a common problem. You've seen companies fail due to this sort of thing, (e.g. Palm) and you've plenty of other companies go through years of sitting on their hands and failing to improve their products (including Apple, Microsoft, Motorola). It's a problem of upper management being short-sighted and risk-averse.
The management probably didn't want to spend too much money on R&D, because that cuts into their profits. Why not keep squeezing the cash-cow they have? You saw this debate recently within Google, where people on Slashdot were arguing about whether Google should be funding all these experimental products, or whether that was a waste of shareholders' money. People don't like spending money, and any exertion of time and effort and money will threaten to alter the status quo. People don't like altering the status quo, especially not when the status quo is working for them.
But then they're also short-sighted. They don't think about how the world changes and technology changes. They don't have a long-term plan for remaining dominant, because they haven't yet taken note of the challengers. They think, "We're so important, we'll never be displaced."
This is often how the powerful fall.
Re:Boggles mind to think about how they squandered (Score:4, Interesting)
Haha, I guess that's true. Maybe what it most says is that Canadians are insecure because we wring our hands over a single big company falling from greatness :) But on the other hand, didn't Nortel go much the same way?
I guess it's a problem for smaller countries where their is only one world-class player in a given market. China or the U.S. doesn't agonize over a single big enterprise stagnating because there are several more waiting in the wings.
There must be consternation in Finland over Nokia akin to the parochial concern for RIM in Canada? Or are the Finns more confident.
ITSS (Score:5, Insightful)
ITSS: It's the software stupid.
Blackberry got to where it was on the strength of its hardware. Problem is the iPhone changed the game and now the software is as important as the hardware.
The blackberry web browser was inferior until rather recently. Developing apps for a BB was a mess compared to the iPhone, the playbook couldn't even read emails until the latest update.
RIM can easily survive: Apple was in worse shape for far longer than RIM and still made a come back. However they need their own Steve Jobs who can refocus the company and develop a product that is a unique proposition, just like Apple developed, in rapid sequence the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad.
Kudos and good job to the executive team (Score:3)
you're finally getting a well deserved vacation for all the hard work you put in the last 15 years
And then there were two. (Score:3)
Maemo is toast, Symbian poofed. Not RIM is going. Wall St and cell carriers did this.
It's like the ocean now only has two species of coral. Android and iOS make up the entire eco-system.
What fun is that?
slashdot behind the times (Score:5, Insightful)
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Despite my UID, I've been here since the beginning. I remember the days when I would almost get excited about what possible things wo
Re:slashdot behind the times (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's raise a glass (Score:2)
To the cadre of senior execs who ran their company into the ground, walked away from the smoking hole with millions and millions of dollars leaving the workforce 'free to pursue other options!"
They panicked. (Score:4, Interesting)
This reminds me of Yahoo: they're listening too much to the pundits, looking too much at trends, and not doing what is known to succeed, which is figuring out what you do right that people like to buy and getting better at it.
I am sorry to see this happen to RIM, but their competition did just up the ante with Android. I still like a lot of the Blackberry features better and often feel their hardware and software is better engineered, but a generation or so behind. Sometimes that's the price you pay for stability but sometimes it's a liability.
Oh, how I love corporate-speak (Score:4, Funny)
"Jim Rowan, chief operating officer of global operations... is leaving to pursue other interests."
Interests include candle-lit dinners, long walks on the beach, and working for a company that isn't circling the drain.
GroupWise+BB (Score:3)
My boss uses a Blackberry. We're a Novell shop and use eDirectory and Groupwise... and there is some kind of integration with the BB. On the other side, the iPhone clients for Groupwise are very expensive and don't offer basic features like push notifications.
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An OS version alone won't save them. They need applications and really good hardware to go with it.
Re:They better hope BB10 is the greatest OS ever. (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the features on paper is the ability to run Android apps natively....
Unless they've scrapped that feature, in which case they're boned.
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If it competently sends and receives email, it'll be an improvement over BB9.
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iPhone has had push e-mail notification since the first major software update. Unless you bought one within a few months of release and never updated it, you should have had that. I don't actually have a Blackberry, but my wife's tells her when she has e-mail. As to the virtual keyboard issue, I can see that. I've never had a problem (I swear my wife can type faster on the virtual keyboard on her iPhone than a real keyboard (yes, my wife has both, work provides the Blackberry)), but I recall seeing a ar
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