Whenever there's a Blackberry article on HN I'm surprised that almost nobody (neither in the article, nor in the comments) mentions the development environment. It is decidedly subpar. Now, I don't know for sure whether developer tooling makes a big difference to the success of a company, but I suspect it does.

I mean, the whole thing requires you to use a PC, and it insists you run in Windows XP compatibility mode if you want to use the simulators (which you only find out by trial-and-error). And even then the simulator stops working every ten runs or so. OK - so you want to run on a device instead? Well, not if the code signing servers are down you don't (required for every build). And that's just the tools - we haven't even started talking about the SDK.