Balsillie planned to bust open BlackBerry network before leaving Ousted RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie spent his last few months at the helm developing a radical strategy to transform the fortunes of the trouble Canadian company by opening up its network to provide basic data plans to non-smartphone users. Two contacts with knowledge of the deal told Reuters that the plan called for the company …
This is a good idea, though it has been for a few years now. RIM expanding and leveraging there strengths and packaging it up as a service they could then not have to stress about bastardising the phones to be me-too's and also get a strong foot onto all other platforms.
Still sadly enough this is what will end up as, an app on the app market and then it will be done by whoever snaps them up at a bargin price. Would appear the board room is full of people busy coverig there own ass's and playing it so safe they have no grip on what to do as there busy doing the headless-chicken inside whilst trying to appear in control. But there again they knew he was probably be a going and so did he, hence he had the time to explore the more obvious routes of RIM's salvation. OSX may be great but how much have they sacraficed in moving egg's into that basket; More than they should of.
Not a Jim hater, having met the man and found him quite nice (unlike Lazaridis, who I found to be an arrogant ass). This seemed to me like the obvious plan for RIM...put BBM out there on other platforms, open up their infrastructure to "other devices" (which they already had in the works). The New Guy (TM) has bet the whole farm on QNX-based phones...what if it really turns out to be the OS/2 of the 21st century? I like Jim's plan better. But thank Odin I'm not a shareholder.
I mean the first Blackberries were amazing devices. Monochrome screen, Querty keyboards, but they were always tied to a Blackberry server which was closed and unobtainable for a normal Geek.
If they had offered an "Open" version of their devices, which essentially was just a high efficiency smart terminal, there would have been a growing market for that. With their current strategy they will only get the large, but shrinking number of Outlook/Exchange users.
so lets get this straight here, a few months ago the network fails because the backend systems could not cope with the demand, which will if not already will kill the company through lack of faith, that could of got compounded because the dicks at the top failed to understand the tech they where selling.
Knock something up and stick it on EC2 instances on Amazon's backbone - instantly massively scalable with current demand too, then who gives a stuff for carrier network or even having so build a datacentre...
Someone bung me a few hundred grand, I have a plan...
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