Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

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Rim is doomed because they've fogotten who their core customers were: businesspeople.

Compare what I think is the greatest phone every made: http://r.phonedog.com/shared/images/items/1464-main-medium-b...

To what it was replaced by: http://www.dplwholesale.com/buy2buygg/2010101415181049514.jp...

The old one was tough as freaking nails. It didn't do much, but it did those things really, really well. It had a scroll wheel on the side, and you clicked and right clicked on things just by either pressing with the tip or the knuckle of your thumb.

It never, ever broke. I still have my original 7520 sittin gin a drawer in my house (unused because I don't have a nextel account anymore). The thing had fallen out of my jeep while it was moving, had been left sitting in a puddle for an hour and it just never, ever stopped ticking. (For reference, here is what happened to my iphone when it fell off the top of my dresser and landed on my wood floor: http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc4/hs980.snc4/75359...)

People were absolutely addicted to their blackberries. The interface was flawless, it synced your mail every 30 seconds, never complained, the battery never died. It was exactly the type of thing that every person working on every product being worked on should strive to replicate. It was a business staple.

Was a business staple. Somewhere along the line, RIM decided to turn their back on the people who had given them so much success and, instead, try to duplicate the success of the razr (remember when that was the hottest phone around?). They ditched the bulletproof plastic cases and battery doors that never came off for shiny, cheap plastic because it was prettier. They ditched the functional, I would say perfect interface of the scroll wheel and thumb-knuckle button for some horrible, horrible trackball that has to be replaced every few months when it either gets too smooth to work, or gets some get stuck inside of it because it was cool.

They made the phone smaller, and lighter. It didn't go in a dorky hip-clip anymore, it went in a pocket or a purse.

RIM, at least in my opinion, stopped making hammers and started making accessories. Unfortunately for them, their accessories aren't even in the same realm as apple's. As much as I don't really like the iphone, I like it a lot better than any or RIM's current offerings.

This is a great strategy, well argued, well reasoned, but it's, to quote the article, 'so 2007'. Single function is great if you're trying to appeal to business people who have no other need than email, but that's becoming increasingly rare.

I would happily trade all the crappy extra features on my Bold 9700 for bulletproof durability, push email faster than outlook, and a glitch-free interface (all of which it fails on at the moment). But the minute our IT department starts supporting iPhone I'll be dropping my Bold.

Consumer smartphones (iPhone/Android) have become a 'good enough' enterprise phones. No they don't email as quickly and don't sync quite perfectly, but neither does RIM. And even if RIM does get that extra 10% of convenience from email, it still won't be worth losing every other app I use. In addition to email I want maps, calendar, dictionary, news, books, music, and games. What do you think is more likely: will iPhone get better at email, or will RIM get better at... everything else?

Our new class of analysts are all dual-wielding iPhones and BB's, and everyone is waiting for IT to start supporting iPhone so we can finally drop RIM. Will email be as fluid, easy, or quick? Probably not. But it'll be good enough, and I can stop carrying this single-function brick around.

I have a Bold 9000 for almost a year now (and I bought it used). My trackball works perfectly without any issues. And this is the toughest phone I've ever owned or seen. So I don't know where you are coming from.

I also like the interface, everything just integrates with everything. I can send pretty much anything to pretty much any service I use (fb, twitter, tumblr, ...) with the same interface. I just love that. But YMMV :)

Do you work in a clean room? (joking).

Honestly, you're lucky. We've had nothing but problems with the trackballs at work. To be clear, I still love the software part of the UI, I just hate the trackball.

Did you ever use any of the old style blackberries?

I've used both the phones in your post and by and large I agree with you. That said, you seem to be talking about phones in a business environment. Do the users of the phones you're talking about own them? I wonder if they treat them with less respect if they can get a new one just by dumping it on your desk every 3 months.

I'm not saying the problem isn't there, just it might be exacerbated by user behaviour that RIM didn't anticipate.

I keep it in the leather thingy (don't know what it's called), maybe that makes a difference ...

I haven't used any of the old models, but now I see that I've been missing out :) My next phone will most likely be the Torch (or it's successor) as I think it combines best of both worlds.

Then you haven't used the Torch yet. :-)

I'll echo what everyone else here is saying - Blackberry is still king with email and might always be. But the iPhone and Android are just doing something completely different that's more relevant to more smartphone users.

I agree that they've tried too hard, for my taste anyway, to attract non-business customers. However, from RIM's point of view, I'm not convinced they made a bad decision. I now have friends who don't need a phone for business reasons, yet they chose Blackberries. In addition, you see people like Justin Bieber using blackberries - while I haven't seen anything on this subject, I'm confident that there are thousands of teenagers out there who'd happilly chose a phone based on what he uses.

As to it no longer being a business staple, I disagree. Personally I think the Bold was their best phone ever, and the Bold 2 repeated that feat. It could and should be better, and there are many improvements I would make, but mostly in areas that the older models (such as the 7520) hadn't even imagined offering.

In my opinion, though, the market of people who would buy a phone just based on what Justin Bieber has are extremely volatile. Unlike businesspeople, they'll switch to whatever the newest, hippest thing to come out is.

Honestly, look at a blackberry bold (which is a $500 phone, wtf?) then look at an HTC evo (the same price). You would have to be absolutely out of your mind to get a blackberry unless you were using BES. I doubt that the justin bieber crowd is using BES.

Sure, it's volatile. But do you think Justin Bieber chose BlackBerry because he wants one, or because he got a huge paycheck to use it? Product placement does not end at television and movies.

You might be right about the product placement, but a BlackBerry is still a sensible choice for Mr. Bieber's line of work: touring the world, constantly meeting with people, etc.

The Justin Bieber crowd will pick it because it's used by him, not because they particularly care about the product itself. Obviously not all his fans would value his choice over their own, but there will be many.

And sure, they're volatile, but I'm not saying that Justin Bieber is the reason their consumer-friendly approach wasn't neccesarily a bad idea, just that it currently does, and will in the future, produce more celebrity (non-verbal) endorsements (by using them).

The Bieber effect is an important point. I think RIM realized that they don't need bleeding edge tech to stay competitive. That's how you sell to people like Bob Lefsetz and David Pogue, but those guys aren't even close to representative of the largest segment of the consumer smartphone market. The way to sell to the everyday smartphone user? Influence. Product placement, both in media and the real world (i.e. putting new units in the hands of celebrities), is an extremely powerful trick. I think it's worked, and will continue to work, very well for RIM. Think about BlackBerry as a brand. Take the wealthiest and most powerful people in America: CEO's, celebrities, politicians. Mostly BlackBerry users. Hell, they even got Obama using one. They've married the ideas of affluence and power to their brand. Sure, those of us who care about innovation and moving tech forward want them to do something groundbreaking like they did with mobile email, but isn't it cheaper to just comp a 15 year old popstar a phone and watch the money roll in? The market rewards big companies with well-marketed mediocrity, so that's what we get. I mean shit, just look at Microsoft.

Blackberries are surprisingly popular with younger people, but I think that's largely a function of how cheap they are compared to other full-keyboard phones that aren't a pain to text with. You can easily get a BB free on contract, and they don't require a data plan. They may not remain popular as other smart phones move downmarket.

I think on Verizon you need a data plan, not sure exactly and not sure about other carriers.

> Rim is doomed because they've fogotten who their core customers were: businesspeople.

In the US. And the US business market is not that big, and considering more people are entering it all the time, it's shrinking fast. Even more so with the iPad making inroads there, which is very likely going to push the iPhone further in it as corporations work on iOS integration in general. RIM is trying to expand into the wider consumer market because they have no choice: if they don't, they will be annihilated as competitors invade their space.

FWIW, RIM never amounted to much in the European business world (apart from the City maybe, but that's not Europe), its sales come mostly from teenagers and young adults as it's the perfect texting line of phones (and in that, TFA is wrong: blackberries aren't good at email, they're excellent at written messages in general)

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