RIM CEO Thorsten Heins: “We took the conscious decision not to go Android. If you look at other suppliers’ ability to differentiate, there’s very little wiggle room. We looked at it seriously – but if you understand what the promise of BlackBerry is to its user base it’s all about getting stuff done. Games, media, we have to be good at it but we have to support those guys who are ahead of the game. Very little time to consume and enjoy content – if you stay true to that purpose you have to build on that basis. And if we want to serve that segment we can’t do it on a me-too approach.” As a geek, I applaud the decision not to go with Android, since it’s already way too dominant as it is. If I were to have a specific interest in RIM’s survival, though, I’m not sure I would be applauding.
I can’t see RIM lasting much longer at this point. I even have higher confidence in a Nokia comeback and long term viability.
They need to do something, fast.
They are both toast.
No matter how you look at it, RIM is in a very, very precarious situation. It would be a real shame to let QNX die like this.
Nevertheless, I believe they still should have taken the Android option. They could then differentiate themselves by integrating their secure BBM network on top of it. That would push many businesses to stick with them for a long time.
It wasn’t the OS that killed them friend, its the simple fact they sat on behind and let the competition get too far ahead. Its the same thing that happened to Palm that sat on behind until it looked like a dinosaur and for years there a blackberry was a blackberry, no real new designs or innovations.
Mobile tech is just not of those areas where one can sit on behind and not get clobbered, MSFT is learning that lesson now as a matter of fact. Just look how many years head start they had but instead of accepting mobile was a different beast they made WinCE teeny tiny desktops complete with start button. Along comes Apple and Google and now they have to blow $450 to get people to pay $50 for a Lumia and still can’t get hardly any takers.
In the end RIM just sat on behind and didn’t use their ownership of the business market to come out with new ideas and new products, they just cashed the checks until they stopped coming and panicked. My guess? Dead in 3, no matter what OS they push. Oh and Android would be a BAD IDEA because frankly Samsung and HTC do it so much better it’d just make RIM look that much worse in comparison.
WinCE was never actually a contender in core smart-phone space. It just failed to adopt to mobile phones and Symbian consortium made sure MS didn’t enter the game using MS backdoor dirty tricks.
It only moderately succeeded where core Windows infrastructure interoperability was a key and where clueless CIOs were talked into by MS reps, but for actual users it was always only mobile version of Lotus Notes hatred story. For keyboard phone devices Symbian was simply better in every account besides app availability but that didn’t matter, bc most of them sucked. Touch devices were no story before IOS.
I know that from a financial standpoint RIM is in a bad way, but to go Android would have been a stupid idea. Playbook OS 2 can already run Android apps very well. The real problem is marketing and developer relations.
Many superior technologies have lost out because their companies do a poor job competing for the minds/hearts of their user-base/developer-base. I’ve regularly used both an Android tablet(CM7) and a Playbook. I seriously prefer the Playbook and so does my wife, who uses it for business. With the announcement of the new Playbook 4G LTE the product is just getting better. More Android developers simply have to be convinced that it is worth the small(very small) effort to repackage their Android apps for the Playbook to generate a new revenue stream. More time needs to be put into creating partnerships with other serious business-app developers, because let’s face it business is the bread and butter of RIM not the person who simply wants to have a toy to watch movies or listen to music, although the Playbook does do this quite well (yes I am digging on iPad, it’s nice but it’s style with surprisingly little substance).
QNX is simply a more robust platform to develop a secure and responsive mobile device. http://www.osnews.com/story/26205/Apple_yanks_privacy_application_f…
CEO Heins, you ARE differentiating RIM … by going out of business.
You should have picked Android and leveraged your large existing user base, who would have stuck with you for services and support. Now you’ll have nothing.
At least they don’t lose their pride. (As Nokia did)
Apple+Samsung has 99% of profits. All other smartphone manufacturers are just trying to stay in business.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/4/2998403/apple-samsung-99-percent-p…
Edited 2012-08-05 22:48 UTC
For Nokia, losing “pride” was long overdue, considering the amount of their talk, RDF about their supposedly still decent situation (while being on a downward spiral for half a decade).
It is overdue also for RIM, really.
Not sure if they live to see it succeed but BBOS 10 is to me the technologically most promising project in the mobile arena. They use Qt but code in C++ and not QML which should give them a performance edge.
Actually, BB10’s main UI framework, Cascades, has both a C++ and a QML API.
Also, since any UI described by QML is tranformed into C++ objects on load time, there will be no runtime difference depending on which API has been used to create the scene.
Why don’t we all applaud RIM for doing something different even if it kills them.
They could have co-opted Android much like Amazon did with their Kindle. They could have had their own proprietary mail and messaging apps and made everything seamless for their core customer base (business), whilst being able to appeal to other non-business customers with products tailored for them for which some of their software stack is not relevant, but who love BBM.
This platform war is going to end on way. Android dominating at the low and medium end of the market (in terms of mobile phone cost), and Apple have a decent sized and non-dominant market share in all segments but mostly competing in the more high-end and expensive part of the market.
MIcrosoft, with all their software prowess is struggling, Nokia is toast. The decision not to take Android or even Windows Phone was very risky. The market cannot support too many platforms. RIM does not have experience managing a modern smartphone platform, and it’s late in the game (as even Microsoft is finding out) to introduce a new platform and get traction. The same network effects that worked wonders for Microsoft are now working against them in the mobile space, and RIM made a huge mistake.
The technology of their stack doesn’t matter. It may be technically better, but Android is more than good enough, and as Windows showed on the desktop, good enough and widely available trumps best but less widely supported.