RIM reports Q4 miss; Balsillie resigns as director, CTO out

Oh please. I often see female centric ads on western tv and I dont get offended.

I am not sure about sexist angle but this clearly shows that blackberry have gone berserk.

They are trying to change their business centric image by alienating last remaining business users without having a foothold in consumer market.

In hindi there is an old saying "Vinash Kale Viprit Budhi" which roughly translates to rational brain stops working when end is near. :)

> Where RIM went wrong was underestimating the importance of software and the surrounding ecosystem.

RIM is quickly discovering that it is not a software company -- and never has been. They are also discovering that software is hard and is the future of mobile.

I say this as someone who was happily employed there a little as three weeks ago (I left to join a startup -- and yes, I absolutely loved my job at RIM). They have some good people but the majority of upper management is lost without a map.

They opted to create another mobile OS/ecosystem. The talent is certainly there, but the time is quickly running out. Apple has been working on iOS for years. Microsoft has been in the OS business for decades. Android is based on Java which has countless man-years behind the tools. RIM is working from QNX which is nice, but is not a full-blown OS/toolchain. There's a lot of work to do there; they've really only been at it for less than a year.

And let's face it: BBOS was something only its mother could love.

I don't think it's ever too late in a tech market as long as your company still has enough funds to launch and market one more product. After all, if you'd looked at pre-iEverything Apple a few years ago and claimed they would be the most valuable company in the world today, most people would have laughed.

That said, RIM clearly has an uphill struggle ahead of it. They need a smash hit, which means they need people with vision at the top. They have limited funds for repeated attempts, so unlike the Microsofts and Googles of this world they can't afford to keep throwing stuff at the wall until they find something that sticks. They've had a string of PR and management disasters in recent years, which matters far more to a business-based market than to consumers. And with the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon all now heavily invested in mobile technology and competing for most of the biggest market segments, it's going to be tough to find a niche that is small enough to make a defensible foothold and yet big enough to expand out into a serious player again.

My guess is that they need a new kind of device, some novel form factor or combination of features that creates or brings credibility to a whole new market the way Apple has done more than once. There are pain points with a lot of the current generation mobile devices, and in particular those devices that rely mostly or entirely on a touchscreen are always going to be primarily consumption devices, which means mobile content creation is an area with potential. RIM actually has a very good track record of, for example, combining real keys (albeit mini ones) with great displays (before the turkey that was the Torch, the half-height displays at the top of high-end Blackberry phones were pushing the resolution frontier long before Retina came along).

Another possibility, and one that is not mutually exclusive with the above, is that RIM could aim for a clean, professional, businesslike UI. Not everyone wants Facebook integration and iFart apps. Personally I don't even want those on my personal phone, and I certainly have no interest in having them in my business devices. On the other hand, I would love to have some mobile gear that started with basically nothing preinstalled except for an OS and comms tools, that had tools available to interoperate with whatever grown-up systems I want to in an easy and secure way, and that had an "app store" with professional software that did useful things. If the same organisation supplying that mobile gear also happens to provide useful back office products and native and/or web-based interfaces that let me talk to them from my desktop/laptop/other large-scale devices, so much the better. Again, RIM probably have more talent in-house in this sort of area than a lot of companies, if they can figure out how to harness it.

Oh, and if RIMM shares are at $500 in five years because they've cornered the "in-house cloud" market, someone please let me know so I can tell them where to send the cheque. ;-)

Remember that their whole consumer push wasn't because of a greedy desire to take Apple's cake, but instead because they saw Apple's success in the consumer market turn into success in the enterprise market. That CEO or CTO loves their iPhone or iPad, and soon and unsurprisingly their corporate policy adapts to embrace it.

Maybe I'm not understanding, but there are a variety of options for touchscreen android phones on prepay here in the U.S.

I should have clarified; yes indeed, Silk does perform like a pig currently, but I like the idea behind it, and I believe that Amazon has the engineering chops to pull it off.

Immediate access to the mobile phone market along with a huge amount of data that can go Amazon's way if they fix Silk, might make a partnership seem mutually beneficial. (Also, since the mobile phone market is still carrier dependent, Amazon will have a harder time penetrating that market segment on its own)

This. Android is posing a serious problem for businesses as people demand to BYO with phones that are a huge melting pot of unknown versions, vulnerabilities, levels of support for exchange, etc. They need to provide their stack as a virtualized system that can work on any Android handset and then have their own analogue of Google "experience" devices where they do the whole thing. They can make some serious hay out of guaranteeing updates, security and support which the Android vendors largely are either ignoring or failing at.

Yes. RIM still has a huge installed base, enterprise sales force, and is still the de-facto "secure" solution. If they could co-opt Android's app ecosystem and build a high-quality, secure Android, they could make a huge dent in the business market.

I proposed this to a RIM BD exec about 2 years ago, but he insisted it would be throwing away way too much of RIM's investment in secure kernels.

But in my mind, the battle was already lost: even most biz users aren't choosing a device based on the nth degree of security. If anything, they love the keyboard.

And for the small niche that truly needs security, RIM could keep one or two BBOS models alive.

Maybe they could still pull off such a strategy?

I absolutely agree that there's a huge market for smartphones in the third world, but I don't see how RIM can successfully take on Huawei, ZTE and the lesser-known, even lower-cost OEMs that are already there.

Same with kids in the developed world - the uk riots were organized by BBM last summer.

This is the most important topic in this discussion and maybe the most topic for any startup or company in general. How do prevent your business from becoming obsolete? Is that even possible in the long run for IT firms? How about staying hungry or at least not becoming arrogant like RIM?

I'm sure embracing Android would be a win for RIM, but would it be too little, too late?