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Comment by Tyrannosaurs | Hacker News Reader

One of the key issues for RIM is that the complete change in the underlying architecture of BB10 means that all existing 3rd party apps are going to have to be rewritten for it.

We have a fairly significant BBOS 6/7 user base in the corporate sector but with what's happening to RIM at the moment we can't come close to justifying that sort of rewrite when we could be putting that effort into Android or iOS.

Anecdotally even Windows Phone is getting more interest from our corporate clients, all (literally all) of our BB customers are seeing RIM as dead in the water and looking to move away.

Now we're in a particular niche but it's one where 18 months ago RIM looked like they might own it, now it looks like it's all over for them here at least.

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Anecdotally even Windows Phone is getting more interest from our corporate clients, all (literally all) of our BB customers are seeing RIM as dead in the water and looking to move away.

This is the real challenge RIM faces -- in an ecosystem-based market people's buying decisions are driven as much by the health of the overall ecosystem as by the merits of an individual product within it. So when it becomes conventional wisdom that your ecosystem is unhealthy, you enter a death spiral: people won't buy your products because the ecosystem is unhealthy, but the only way to improve the health of the ecosystem is to get people to start buying your products again. It's brutal.

The only way out of it is to come up with a product that nails absolutely everything: great hardware, great software, great third-party support, great price. I'm not sure anyone's ever managed to pull that off, though. Palm tried with their webOS devices, but while the software on those was excellent and the price was reasonable, the hardware was abysmal and the third-party support anemic. So they weren't enough to pull Palm out of the death spiral.

>This is the real challenge RIM faces -- in an ecosystem-based market people's buying decisions are driven as much by the health of the overall ecosystem as by the merits of an individual product within it.

Doesn't BB10 run Android apps? It may not run them well, but it's probably a good start before developers start writing native BB10 apps.

On the other hand the danger is that devs rely on the Android compatibility layer and ignore the native APIs like it happened with OS/2 and Windows/DOS compatibility.

BB10 does indeed have an Android Player and in my experience it works pretty well. I played with it earlier in the year and while it did not support apps that made JNI calls at that time, it worked pretty well for vanilla Android applications. I assume JNI support will be added or perhaps has already been added since it's been while since I last looked at it.

I don't see why people would complain about no backwards compatibility with BB7. BB7 is legacy OS and almost a relic of another era compared to Android, iOS and QNX in BB10. If you are going to support apps for one other OS, Android is a much better target due to the sheer amount of apps out there.

If you're a corporate who've invested significantly in training, business specific software, support infrastructure and so on for a particular platform to be told you've got to start over is a massive deal and you care a whole load that your massive investment is largely for nothing.

Backward compatibility would have allowed many corporates (a significant market for RIM) to maintain that investment and if they could do that that would be a major reason to stick with RIM. The fact that RIM have cut them loose effectively means they have to start over and makes RIMs incumbency effectively worthless when it comes to business retention.

Android apps need to be repackaged in order to run on a BlackBerry device, however the process (at least for me with 4 apps) is pretty painless. My four apps took about half a day. Add in the time it took to collect images and metadata and it took all of 7 hours work to prepare and submit them.

That's pretty impressive. if they work well this is really a huge win. I wish windows phone 8 could do that.

Steve Jobs did it to Apple Computers in 1997. Though admittedly that's a rare case.

Steve jobs didn't do "better in everything" when he came back. He knew he couldn't win the race, so he changed the rules : a computer had to be "pretty" as well, and (re)introduced a very strong emphasis on design, with the marketing that goes with it (remember those dancing translucent imacs).

I guess that means you don't have to be absolutely better on everything, but just one thing that others underestimated and which could compensate for everything else you may be lacking (imacs were expensive, slow,and not compatible with windows).

In the case of blackberry that could mean restart from a niche, such as extra-strong security, beat everybody else on that market with science-fiction stuff such as retina authentication, ultra strong encryption everywhere, etc...

This is a good point, and one that I should have thought of in my original comment: an alternate strategy is to keep the company alive by retreating to a defensible position, a niche that you own in some way that makes you a compelling alternative for customers in that niche, and then focus all your energies on owning the shit out of that niche. It's less ambitious, and the upside is smaller, but the risk of total failure is smaller too.

That's essentially what Jobs did with Apple -- we think of Apple as a huge success under his leadership, but that didn't really happen until they entered a different market with the iPod. Before then he kept them alive by giving up their ambitions to compete with Microsoft for the PC business in general and focusing their business on a few strong, high-margin products distinguished by classy design. They weren't enough to make Apple dominant again, but they were enough to keep the company afloat.

In other words Jobs successfully pulled a Kobayashi Maru. I think his second coming was brilliant, and will be taught in business schools in the yers to come.

> (imacs were expensive, slow,and not compatible with windows).

Not one of those things is true, except for Windows compatibility which was hardly a concern for the users of it. The iMac was actually quite aggressively priced for the time, and it was far from "slow".

I hope you honestly try and launch something based off this philosophy, so you can see it crash-and-burn firsthand. The iMac had plenty more going for it at the time. Design was a big part of it, but it was far from the only good thing about the iMac as you insist.

iMacs had built in screens, high capacity hard drives (for the time), tray loading CD drives with burner options, USB, FireWire, etc... almost all of which was hot new shit at the time.

The iMac was the first example. Great product, experience, and price. It was just getting long in the tooth in terms of ecosystem because of Mac OS Classic.

>This is the real challenge RIM faces -- in an ecosystem-based market

It is no longer a smartphone market. It is, as you said, and ecosystem market. Incidentally, a phone's ecosystem goes beyond even the entire platform of the OS, and includes multiple OSes. Apple has reaped incredible benefits not just because iOS has a vibrant app store and it ends there, but because iOS has a powerful desktop OSX ecosystem that people want to link up with and get a value add from. The halo effect.

This is why I think RIM is essentially doomed. If they deliver an absolutely stunning operating system nested in a peerless hardware chassis that just nails it perfectly...they will have provided an answer to the wrong problem. I just have not heard RIM even whisper compellingly about how it is going to deliver that vibrant ecosystem that is absolutely not an option, in the face of challenges like BYOD, the lack of any developer interest, the historic lack of developer interest, the lack of an app store (yes I know), the lack of consumer media content to sell, etc. Do consumers even want another mobile OS even a little bit?. Devs absolutely will not show up until consumers by it in droves, and how is RIM going to deliver the chicken and the egg at the same time?

I believe they dropped the ball years ago, and now they are just paying the protracted price and it's probably too late. An incredible OS on incredible hardware isn't what they need to deliver, -just an absurdly small piece of it.

>This is why I think RIM is essentially doomed. If they deliver an absolutely stunning operating system nested in a peerless hardware chassis that just nails it perfectly...they will have provided an answer to the wrong problem

Personally, I don't care about an ecosystem because I don't use third party apps at all. An excellent piece of hardware running a fantastic OS would be great. In fact, the 9900 I have right now is pretty close. However I do believe that the ecosystem is of significant concern for the general use case. So what if they were to hire or contract a number of developers (or entire companies) to build something like the top 50 iPhone apps for BB10 and have that ready to go at launch? On top of that, make them free for a year and have the top 5 pre-installed on the device. Would people still complain about the ecosystem? What if they made their team of developers responsive, so that they are constantly building the most searched for and unfound apps? I can't believe that a perfect phone and perfect OS wouldn't be a very solid position from which to regain a decent stable market.

>Personally, I don't care about an ecosystem because I don't use third party apps at all.

Then you are a feature phone customer, not a smartphone customer, for the most part. Nothing wrong with that at all, but if they want to survive, they need to meet the full expectations of smartphone customers that want to utilize their devices to the hilt. As far as paying for the top 50 apps...it isn't feasible. The top 50 apps include many apps that are actually platforms in and of themselves. Coding for an entirely new OS induces obscene costs up front, and for ongoing support, and in order to justify those, there needs to be a substantial customer base, -not a hope for one and a substitute of cash in its place. RIM doesn't have enough money to bribe devs into bad business decisions on that scale. Unfortunately for RIM, apps are made by developers not on their payroll, and developers are independent business with bills to pay. They aren't going to waste their precious resources like money, time, infrastructure, marketing, and opportunity cost to build for an OS that has no customers at the moment. Classic chicken and egg scenario, and yes, a perfect OS on perfect hardware in no way implies a solid position from which to regain a decent stable market anymore. The market has matured.

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