Anonymous RIM Employee Blasts Company in Open Letter (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Anonymous RIM Employee Blasts Company in Open Letter (2011)

allthingsd.com

> 4) Developers, not Carriers can now make or break us [1]

Hindsight is 20/20, but this anonymous letter to RIM Senior Management Team, really nailed this point. The developer ecosystem, and the app for everything mind set, that Apple pretty much invented, and later emulated via Google with Android, is simply stunning.

Personally, I think RIM should turn itself into mainly a hardware vendor, cut its losses, agree that Apple and Google own the market, and join them. Ditch BlackBerry OS, install Android (with their custom BES encryption used in the enterprise [2]), and tap into the massive market of developers, just waiting there. Why on earth are they putting this effort into a losing battle?! I think there is a poker term for this (chase [3]), when you are in a bad hand, but you still have all this money invested, so you keep bleeding, hoping the situation will improve, till you get killed.

[1] http://bgr.com/2011/06/30/open-letter-to-blackberry-bosses-s...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_Enterprise_Server

[3] http://pokerterms.com/chasing.html

I am sad because of QNX, not BB. I don't know what's the future of QNX if BB decides to follow the Android or Windows 8 route.

I'm assuming somebody else will pick up QNX, or it will be split off into it's own company. I don't think most people realise the value of QNX, maybe not as a phone OS, but in running so many other devices.

Interestingly, RIM doesn't say how much revenue QNX makes for the company. http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/04/05/the-little-known-comp...

I'm guessing that QNX will soon face a run for its money as iOS and/or Android start seeing use in devices besides phones and tablets. A common UI experience from phone to tablet to automobile controls/navigation would be something consumers would appreciate.

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that iOS and Android will never be running nuclear reactors.

I think you're right for things that have moderately interesting interfaces, but do you really need android in your thermostat? Keychain? Other random device? Qnx in card isn't just your maps and stuff, it's your braking system, crash detection system, etc.

I don't think you understand what QNX is or where it's used then. QNX will not be seeing serious competition from Android or iOS anytime soon in the domains it has locked up - ones which require hard real-time.

Indeed so. I once worked on a digital delivery system for broadcast radio, able to perform as anything from virtual cart heads through to (sadly) completely automating it, switching between local playlists and sat feeds as required.

It ran under QNX/Photon. It never, ever crashed; QNX's reputation for reliability is well earned.

> Ditch BlackBerry OS, install Android (with their custom BES encryption used in the enterprise [2])

I'm confident if someone would come in to the Android world and do an enterprise-focused build that can have support sold, they'd kill the market in a good way - like what RedHad did for Linux. A very closely-forked branch that is never more than a few months behind AOSP, but had all the reliability and security of what BlackBerry used to provide would be amazing.

Samsung is trying to corner that market with Knox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Knox

Android also started to include and adopt patches from SEAndroid project from NSA (I realize saying it after the leaks now would make some shake their heads disapprovingly).

Knox + SEAndroid patches is basically starting to move in the direction of cornering the enterprise mobile market.

I thought it was called "pot stuck". Chasing implies that you still have some hope (i.e. you are waiting for a card to drop to make your hand). "Pot stuck" is when you know you are beat, but you can't get yourself to fold because you have already committed so much to the pot.

A minor correction; the phrase is usually "pot committed".

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pot%20committ...

> 6) No Accountability – Canadians are too nice

As a Canadian that has worked outside the country, I seriously wonder if this isn't the biggest fault of Canadian companies. This alone could be the reason RIM failed.

They also do a lot of hiring of interns from universities. Namely the one I go to, and unfortunately I know some of them and they are terrible engineers. I don't know how much that could hurt the company, but it has to cost them something. Even though they get tax breaks for those interns.

Yep, RIM hires an abnormally high number of co-ops from Waterloo.

Ditching BBOS and using Android is exactly what SGI tried to do by ditching IRIX and going with Windows NT. It destroyed the company. Not that BBM has any hope at this point, but getting rid of BBOS is not the solution, because they will lose their current fans, and they will not migrate over any existing Android users.

The Visual Workstation line failed because you could get 90% of the performance for <50% of the cost by buying/building a dual-PII/PIII workstation and throwing an NVIDIA graphics card in it. The architecture SGI used for the initial pair of Visual Workstations was proprietary and didn't provide enough performance gain to justify its proprietary-ness, and the later models were just bog-standard PCs with bog-standard NVIDIA graphics cards slapped in pretty SGI cases with huge price tags. The Visual Workstation line would've failed no matter what operating system they ran.

But the Visual Workstation line's failure was merely one gut punch in a succession of gut punches that destroyed SGI. SGI had two core competencies: graphics workstations and HPC. The availability of cheap (comparatively) multi-processor x86 workstations running ports of formerly IRIX-only software killed their workstation lines, and the combination of Itanium being late, Itanium trailing way behind x86 in $/FLOPS and watts/FLOP, and x86 clusters with fast Myrinet (later 10GigE and Infiniband) interconnects becoming in vogue killed most (not all, but enough) of SGI's HPC market share.

(I type this all with a bit of sadness: part of my first job out of college was running and porting software to a 20 CPU, 20 GB RAM SGI Power Challenge 10000, and I still have a soft spot for exotic big iron.)

Totally agree with you. The last thing BB should do is get rid of their assets. Besides, UI-wise, BBOS is already quite close to android, and very open to android apps: develop your app for android, convert it trivially to a BB app with the SDK tools and you're done.

My main gripe as a dev. regarding BB is the same as for Bada (Tizen ancestor): no SDK on linux (which also means BSD). It's a minor point though.

Nah, the real problem with BB is its image outside its user base. I bet most people associate BB with tiny devices with tiny keyboard, while people think of Apple and Android stuff as cool, fashionable. Their latest product sports touch screens and perhaps more, but it will take time for the public to pick it up.

I think they actually have a chance of not dying if they do this. And knowing they're in this position they could perhaps have partnerships that Apple and Google would not be willing to do, and which could help them differentiate.

One of the funniest/saddest parts of how RIM treated developers was that initially there was something like a $250 fee to get into their developer program, and then you only got something like 5 app submissions/updates. You then had to pay for more submissions/updates. I believe they suspended this policy around the time they launched the BB Playbook, but compared to distributing through Google Play or the Apple App store, it was surprisingly ridiculous.

Also, Window's Store developer setup experience was pretty embarrassing as of a year or so ago.

If you want your ecosystem to do well, nail the developer onboarding experience, not just the getting started docs but the whole end to end experience. As a multiplatform developer, it makes a huge difference to where I want to develop for.

From their historical position as an "enterprise" phone provider, the dev program makes sense. It's like how being a Microsoft Windows developer used to be. You had to pay for all the tools. They may have felt that by having a price of entry it would help ensure that only "serious" developers would bother to apply.

And then there was the wonderfully.. "hand crafted" touch, shall we say. Order your keys to develop for them, and:

== Your BlackBerry JDE Signature key order has been received and will be processed shortly. It could take up to 10 business days to fully process your order. You will receive a confirmation email prior to your signature keys being issued. If you require further assistance with regards to your order, please email devsupport@rim.com, providing your Company Name, Name, Email Address and Date/Time of your order. ==

Yes, that's 10 business days to get underway.

(At the time - 2011 - I recall their app store could only be browsed under Windows, thanks to a fundamental reliance on DirectX components. This struck me as a little odd)

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