RIM CEO On What Went Wrong 299
AZA43 writes "After releasing some very ugly financial numbers in late June, BlackBerry-maker RIM went on a media blitz to downplay the significance of its latest earnings and counter increasingly negative media attention. ... But a new Q&A with BlackBerry chief Thorsten Heins offers a unique take on what exactly went wrong at RIM — Heins blames the company's downfall [partly] on LTE in the U.S. — and he actually seems genuine in his answers."
A peek into the mind of RIM's upper management.
LTE? (Score:5, Informative)
Its not being ready for LTE that kill them, it was the lack of modernizing the user interface and modern phones that killed them.
Instead of phones, RIM is now selling jets (Score:5, Informative)
I just read RIM has sold one of their corporate jets [theglobeandmail.com] in order to stay afloat. That's pretty desperate.
Hmmm (Score:5, Informative)
I have to run Blackberry Enterprise Server. Its a complete pain in the ass in terms of support and main. Its years behind, and its clunky, chunky, and we end up going through endless workload and silly upgrade games. The handsets break if users look at them. I have to do warranty on them daily, and BB now quibble over each return, making the whole thing fail.
The handsets themselves - good email platform, crap at everything else. And the world _is_moving off being email platform centric.
Blackberry messenger is a bright point, but that should be broken out and made an application layer across all mobile devices. The same could well be said for the application layer and so on.
Their network is creaking, but is the one serious advantage that they have, but leverage poorly.
The playbook should have been a blackberry in a tablet form. Instead you needed a BB and as PB to get function. = Fail. Do not now how that ever, ever, ever passed QA and system testing.
If I were BB, I would go software only, and build my whole thing as a software/API/Network package, and build on that. Make the software a package available on all main platforms (Android, IOS, Others) and sell on data packages, and data transit using BB networks. And I'd radically overhaul BB enterprise server into something cleaner, better supported and easier to install, manage, run.
If they stay in the handset market, they need a killer phone/tablet BB 10 release, and they need to cut down handsets to one cheap cheerful, and one kickass model (curve/bold) and stop shipping masses of differening handsets, and make the things robust (the current models are not robust, and are inexusably so) And whatever tablet they ship needs to be a full BB.
(For the record, the playbook was so close to being very very good, and was wrecked by a simplistically small, but incredibly important part, that the whol board and playbook team need to have their heads banged together until they realise how stupid that fail was)
Not that anyone at BB listens anymore.
Nuff said.
Re:LTE? How about Android and IPhone (Score:0, Informative)
didn't steve ballmer basically come out and say this in the past week? basically hinted that apple has outdone them, but that is all about to change?! we shall see.
Re:LTE? How about Android and IPhone (Score:4, Informative)
I was talking about QNX. Real time helps them because it makes the system much more responsive. Phones because of weak CPUs, network interference and limited memory often have noticeable lags. A real time kernel allows the phone to always be responsive to the end user while handling those tasks effectively.. It also allows for vastly more sophisticated power management which can result in much longer battery life.
And you are right desktop OSes don't use them. All the desktop OSes since the days of OS9 have been designed for servers. Which means they focus on throughput not responsiveness, and then adjusted for the desktop to some extent.
Re:LTE? How about Android and IPhone (Score:5, Informative)
That is not exactly what a Real time OS does. Given not enough CPU to handle all the tasks it abandons any that take too long. Users really don't like those sorts of things. Real Time operating systems are really only good for that environment, where late means worthless.