I Told You RIM Was in Trouble
appleoutsider.com
appleoutsider.com
If I were at Palm now or before their acquisition by HP, I would be pushing to ease up on the consumer focus and make an all-out attack on Blackberry's home turf.
RIM has completely lost focus. It has taken its eyes off of its own flagship product, and is busy trying to copy whatever anyone else is doing--but it can't really make up its mind who it wants to copy.
I think WebOS could have been a tremendous hit in enterprise IT departments. Anyone who can handle basic web technologies can write apps for it. If Palm had focused on the enterprise segment, WebOS could have been God's gift to any IT department saddled with a significant number of in-house applications.
Grab someone with a web development certificate from the junior college, give them a month, and you can have an app on all your in-the-field employees' mobile phones. Oh, and you can trivially port it to your desktop machines, too!
</wannabe pundit>
Prediction: Apple will probably quietly introduce SMB-focused changes in the next year to make it stupidly simple to create custom apps and distribute to iOS devices outside of the App Store, then everyone else will spend 3 years chasing that angle. :/
I know your point was enterprise IT, but allow me to illustrate with a consumer example. The same reasoning applies.
Here in India, I see most of the hip young crowd carrying Blackberrys. Note that unlocked, grey-market iPhones are available in India at not-too-deterring prices. But Blackberrys are defacto, and all you see people doing is message, message, message.
We have some of the rock bottom rates on calls and SMS - yet you can buy a fixed-rate Blackberry messenger subscription at nearly every service provider in India which lets you do unlimited group messaging (irrespective of domestic or international). I think you can also group-message a certain number of multimedia items.
Now that is something that not even Apple has cracked. The system is seamless.
<begin prediction consumer> The only competition to Blackberry in the hip-messaging market will come with the Facebook phone which will seamlessly integrate the mobile angle to the Facebook Messaging platform. </end prediction consumer>
<begin prediction enterprise> R.I.M can only be broken by the final integration of Google Voice, Gizmo5, Slide/Disco and some form of video chat into Android. The notification-bar on Android is simply custom built for messaging notifications. </end prediction enterprise>
If memory serves, before RIM moved in, Palm owned the enterprise handheld market. They could do it again if they tried.
Jim, you can't have it both ways. "No compromise" means that there is only one way to do it, the best way. "You can pick whichever one you want" means that there's more than one way to do it and various compromises must be made to support them all. No matter, although it's oxymoronic to pursue both strategies, your actions have made it very clear that the Playbook is trying to do everything and is absolutely going to be a compromise product.
I believe your approach comes from your undeniable success in "The Enterprise." When you are selling one hundred tablets to individuals, the dynamic is this: Tablet A does a good job of appealing to half of the market. Tablet B does a good job of appealing to the other half of the market. Then the Playbook comes along and takes a compromise position, doing a mediocre job of appealing to the entire market. A and B divide the market, and Playbook gets table scraps.
However, the enterprise is allegedly different. The argument is that if a committee is choosing a single tablet to for 100 people to use, even if half would be better using A and the other half would be better using B, Playbook is "good enough" for everyone and so A is shut out, B is shut out, and RIM gets 100 Playbook sales.
I'd buy that argument if tablets will be purchased the way desktop PCs and corporate phones used to be purchased. However, some things have changed. You can have web apps that play identically on Android and iOS tablets. You can have push notification to both devices. You can get Exchange email on both devices. I am not sure that one corporation needs to standardize on tablets the way they needed to standardize on phones ten years ago or on PCs twenty years ago.
It might be that enterprises happily buy A for everybody, B for everybody, or let people use A or B as they prefer. Times seem to have changed in the last decade. Your company believes otherwise, that much is obvious, and you are betting thousands of jobs on your belief.
As Georges St-Pierre says, "Good luck with that."
My favorite part of the whole article.
I would rather get fast www pages than apps from the app store. If I can have gmail, pdf's, wikip, and a few random pages open at once I'm very happy.
I'm sure Apple has stuff in the pipeline that is much more advanced that is currently on the market.
The Android stack, kernel excepted, is Apache-licensed (thanks, davidw). To graft Bionic (or any glibc workalike) on top of QNX should be a walk in the park in comparison to build a full competitive stack.
Obviously, if you can avoid being commoditized by maintaining your own software platform, that's great. I just don't see that RIM is bringing anything to the table with their OS: http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=2263882
This way they can build differentiation full Android stack integrators can't. That, of course, if QNX proves a better environment than Linux.
This is, BTW, the same strategy Microsoft adopted eons ago, when the de-facto standard business OS was CP/M. It was very easy to port your programs from CP/M to MS-DOS (thanks, in no small part, to Intel making the 8086 asm-source compatible with the 8085) and that allowed them to have a reasonable software base from the start. Unfortunately, for CP/M, this was a one way road - it was not as easy to port back.
If Rim can manage a superset of Android, they may have a fighting chance to differentiate themselves.
At this point, I'm more concerned about their competency than their strategy.
OTOH, I believe the Apple app store TOS would prohibit any in-store app to be distributed in any way other than the store, so, there is one interesting contractual risk.
Uh. 3.0 was created specifically to address tablet concerns, was it not? 2.3 is still the new hotness for phones.
The problem is that any post talking about android, mobile, RIM, Apple, tablet is "hot" and likely to get upvoted even if it's crappy.
Since people seem to think that I am in the wrong so fine, I've been in HN since the beginning, tried to do by humble contributions but there's a lot of aggression and the quality of posts has nosedived. I guess I don't belong, so I'll exit quietly.