This blog has long bashed RIMM and for good reason.
From a technical point of view the blackberry devices are a great bit of engineering. They don’t seem to break. They have a near nuclear powered battery. Their reception seems exceptional. A great foundation for a great phone. But something is still wrong. For some reason I have been riding in many cars where the driver had a blackberry ring so I was the one answering it. I screwed this up nearly every time. I was suddenly faced with a space shuttle command deck of buttons. I then realized: Why does the black berry look like the command interface of the space shuttle (1970) while the iPhone/Android looks like the command interface of the Enterprise on Star Trek?
I suspect that the answer to the above question lay at the heart of both RIMM and Apple. While android is mostly following Apple the extra buttons they keep adding seems to be a stupid nod to Blackberry.
But where will this lead? To me the answer is obvious. For RIMM to compete with Apple they would have to release some very very cool toys and completely abandon huge segments of their present marketing/development strategies. They would have to focus on the end consumer and abandon their seemingly incestuous relationships with the Telcos. They would have to take their marketing studies and shove them up the asses of their in-house MBAs. Then they would have to get a dozen art schools to come in and redesign everything. And lastly they would have to get me to want to port my apps over to Blackberry. I can even tell you how to succeed at the last. Give me a great tool that allows me to make iPhone apps that also happens to make Blackberry apps. This might seem stupid but while the Apple tool XCode is getting better it isn’t very good.
So seeing that very few companies have the balls for a reorganization of the above magnitude I doubt that RIMM will do more than try to shore up their defenses. They will “trim the fat” which begs the question of why did they have any fat. They will hire Celine Dion or some such to try and con people into using their products. And they will probably try to figure out ways to make existing even more stuck with them.
But the above is all speculation but here is the fact that I will go by. Blackberry Playbooks are available for sale at Walmart. Holy crap Walmart? The price is the same as an iPad. How downmarket can they go? To me this is an act of shear desperation. Blackberry is has always been an enterprise tool what the hell customer base are they hoping for at Walmart? This smacks of statistics rigging. I can just see the announcement: “We have Playbooks in 10,000 outlets in North America. This is 20% more than iPads and iPhones.”
But again RIM doesn’t have much debt and they are still a profitable company with revenues that I would be proud of if I had a company that big. But so did Sun before they were eaten as did Novell before they too were eaten. RIM is no Enron or Ponzi scheme but what they are is on a long grinding road to irrelevance.
One last dig is about this QNX thing. From a programmer’s point of view I don’t understand. QNX was a small blib on my radar around 1999. It was a cool little OS that was tight as hell. But I don’t understand what positive impact it could have on Blackberry. Personally I would think that they would want to go with Linux, Android, or BSD as those have widespread support and a huge base of potential developers.
So from a technical point I am going to say: QNX Huh?
And a human point I will say:Walmart Huh?
Oh one last point. There seems to be some kind of Bay street love for Blackberry. They keep blah blahing about it being a great Canadian company and that Canadians should love them. But keep in mind that Canadians don’t like the sort of people who use Blackberries: Lawyers, real-estate people, government types, and yes bay street types. I don’t see doctors, artists, bakers, or other nice people using Blackberries.