<wannabe pundit><p>If I were at Palm now or before their acquisition by HP, I would be pushing to ease up on the consumer focus and make an all-out attack on Blackberry's home turf.<p>RIM has completely lost focus. It has taken its eyes off of its own flagship product, and is busy trying to copy whatever anyone else is doing--but it can't really make up its mind who it wants to copy.<p>I think WebOS could have been a tremendous hit in enterprise IT departments. Anyone who can handle basic web technologies can write apps for it. If Palm had focused on the enterprise segment, WebOS could have been God's gift to any IT department saddled with a significant number of in-house applications.<p>Grab someone with a web development certificate from the junior college, give them a month, and you can have an app on all your in-the-field employees' mobile phones. Oh, and you can trivially port it to your desktop machines, too!<p></wannabe pundit>
<i>I think it's very important to understand that this idea of "no compromise" matters. And this idea that you can pick whichever one you want.</i><p>Jim, you can't have it both ways. "No compromise" means that there is only one way to do it, the best way. "You can pick whichever one you want" means that there's more than one way to do it and various compromises must be made to support them all. No matter, although it's oxymoronic to pursue both strategies, your actions have made it very clear that the Playbook is trying to do everything and is absolutely going to be a compromise product.<p>I believe your approach comes from your undeniable success in "The Enterprise." When you are selling one hundred tablets to individuals, the dynamic is this: Tablet A does a good job of appealing to half of the market. Tablet B does a good job of appealing to the other half of the market. Then the Playbook comes along and takes a compromise position, doing a mediocre job of appealing to the entire market. A and B divide the market, and Playbook gets table scraps.<p>However, the enterprise is allegedly different. The argument is that if a committee is choosing a single tablet to for 100 people to use, even if half would be better using A and the other half would be better using B, Playbook is "good enough" for everyone and so A is shut out, B is shut out, and RIM gets 100 Playbook sales.<p>I'd buy that argument if tablets will be purchased the way desktop PCs and corporate phones used to be purchased. However, some things have changed. You can have web apps that play identically on Android and iOS tablets. You can have push notification to both devices. You can get Exchange email on both devices. I am not sure that one corporation needs to standardize on tablets the way they needed to standardize on phones ten years ago or on PCs twenty years ago.<p>It might be that enterprises happily buy A for everybody, B for everybody, or let people use A or B as they prefer. Times seem to have changed in the last decade. Your company believes otherwise, that much is obvious, and you are betting thousands of jobs on your belief.<p>As Georges St-Pierre says, "Good luck with that."<p><a href="http://raganwald.posterous.com/dear-jim" rel="nofollow">http://raganwald.posterous.com/dear-jim</a>
link to the RIM CEO's talk. worth a read. if i had RIM stock i would be frantically selling it right now. <a href="http://pastie.org/1716857" rel="nofollow">http://pastie.org/1716857</a>
IMO RIM needs to "pivot" and enable their consumer devices for activesync. I think there's still a market for their BES software in the Enterprise, but the majority of small & medium businesses don't want to have to have a BES for their users to have email on their phones. Most of them have Exchange servers with activesync already in place. RIM even gives away the BES Express software for free now and still we have clients who aren't interested. From my experience with BES (Working for an IT Services provider with over 300 clients) I have found it to be a huge POS that works when it works, but when it doesn't it usually requires either a blackberry specialist, or a call to RIM's support.
Had the opportunity to play with the Playbook at Enterprise Connect a few week ago. The only advantage the RIM guy could recite was that "it does flash". He let me play with the tablet and it was very warm (almost hot) to the touch on the back of the tablet. The buttons on the top felt cheap and like they could break at any moment. When I told him it was good to see it's not vaporware, but then mentioned my observations, he simply reminded me "yeah, but it does flash". I wonder if these design issues are why it hasn't hit the market yet?
The reality is that RIM is behind in product development by about 1-2 years arguably...They have yet to release a phone that could even be compared to the first iPhone...<p>I'm sure Apple has stuff in the pipeline that is much more advanced that is currently on the market.
If there is any reason to assume RIM not to be doomed is this. If they manage to leech off a competing ecosystem, they inherit its advantages immediately. Assuming Google won't go Microsoft on them (as in Microsoft sabotaging Digital Research), I see nothing bad coming.<p>The Android stack, kernel excepted, is Apache-licensed (thanks, davidw). To graft Bionic (or any glibc workalike) on top of QNX should be a walk in the park in comparison to build a full competitive stack.
<i>it’s limited to the all-but-obsolete Android 2.3 “Gingerbread” runtime.</i><p>Uh. 3.0 was created specifically to address tablet concerns, was it not? 2.3 is still the new hotness for phones.
I'd be backing whatever the kids are adopting and round here all the teens are getting blackberrys.
Plus "We're the Blackberry Boys" seems to be on every commercial break.