Circling the RIM: BB10 becomes chamber of horrors for BlackBerry Friday's writedown of almost $1bn of inventory confirms the launch of BlackBerry 10 mobile OS as one of the most catastrophic of modern times. Nobody, it seems, wants BB10 in 2013. BlackBerry has vastly over-estimated the demand for its shiny, modern new platform and announced a retreat from the consumer market. Gone are 4,500 …
This is El Reg after all, not the Financial Times ( although they probably have their fair share of buzzwords too).
The pigistes here are highly skilled agents in buzzword bingo, hell, when the left their marketing department caves to become world renowned El Reg hacks they also dragged along the buzzword pasttime.
Personally I am not a great "buzzword bingo" player but I must admit in having a little penchant for the rather clever titles and headlines that appear from time to time.
This article for example "Circling the RIM". I wondered if it not really a El Reg hack spoonerism for "Rimming the circle"..
Ole El Reg.... ------->>>> The icon represents a toreador...........think outside of the box
Prosumer for a high valued user who demands highest performance but is paying for the device themselves rather than having it supplied to them seems a perfectly valid, precise and useful term.
If you want to criticize misused words - "Professional" is from to profess or swear to become part of a guild - not something that even the most hardened of developers do. Consumer is from to consume, to eat up or to destroy - which is perhaps more accurate.
BB10 looked really nice. It was always in the back of my mind that I'd probably hop over to BB10 when I finally gave up on webOS.
It seems, if you want to know what technology is going to die, ask me what my preference is (I'm still using a Pre 3 as my only phone, and have an AmigaOne XE-G4 that I still use occasionally :)
I can honestly say as a Z10 user (Free on a £24 per month contract thank you) BB10 IS nice. I would honestly say if you are going to leave your WebOS phone go for it. I mean there are apps still available on BlackBery App World and there's nothing really you can't find on there.
To be honets, I'm kind of tired of backing the dead horse. As much as it pains me (I never liked Android at all), I'm probably going to join the Android crowd. Its a lot better than it used to be, and maybe when I finally can't hold on to webOS any more, maybe it'll actually be nice to use :-)
I'm certainly sad to see Blackberry go; two years ago I really couldn't have imagined dropping them, primarily for the email but mainly for the hard keyboard on which I can bang out a pretty reasonable 35 wpm - I'm lucky to get half that on a virtual KB.
But with the app store, it became pretty obvious the game was up, in much the same way it panned out for the string of Palms and Handsprings I swore by in the decade before Blackberry. Even 4-5 years ago pretty much any major mobile application would be made available for the BB, often before or better specced than for Apple or Android (my last Google maps for the BB still pisses on the version for the iphone), and when the majors started dropping it, many of the minor - often the most useful - apps development suffered too; low user-base, underpowered hardware (my last personal BB Torch 9800 was underpowered pretty much from the moment I got it), outdated OS. With the release dates pushed back and back last year and the other OS app stores offering whole classes of stuff the Blackberry didn't, the game was well and truly up.
I was given a work Z10 early this year; nice enough phone and most of the core OS design and functionality was indeed excellent, but too many of the ways of doing things hadn't really moved on enough from the past, particularly anything to do with touchscreen, and most of the legacy applications looked really, really threadbare both on such a large screen and in functionality. With the BIS email thoroughly denuded there didn't seem a lot of point hanging around, so I bought an iphone, which has flaws galore that are not entirely balanced by its virtues - some of the "mistakes" are simply backwards in mobile terms - but it does at least feel better than 'last gasp'.
The Apple app store may well be knee deep in utter shite, but the proportion of worthwhile applications is probably higher than BB ever managed, and the very best of them are genuinely outstanding. The best of the public transport apps in particular are sufficiently rich and quick to pass well onto the "useful" side of the border with "frivolous"; the time the Blackberry equivalents took to fire up and do their thing made them often more effort than they were worth. The one thing I really do miss from the Torch (aside from push email) though is the ability to reflow text when enlarging a web page - I haven't found this in any of the browsers on the iphone.
I'd love to see Blackberry make a comeback at some point when it has its house in order, but I'd imagine the future is likely to be business only for a long time to come.
>if you want to know what technology is going to die, ask me what my preference is
Well for app development, webOS was the first one I looked into, then Blackberry, and Apple as the third choice with Android as a maybe in the future. Thankfully I never bothered as I was only looking for a very simple task that even the then simple browsers could handle, but damned if you pick betamax because it looks better on paper.
The launch price of the Z10 was nuts, £45 a month was the average it seemed when I looked into getting one. Even now EE are still trying to sell them at £36 a month but Phones 4 U have totally given up on them. I'm waiting for the fire sale to pick one up cheap on PAYG to compliment the PlayBook I bought for £75.
The Playbook is actually a rather nice tablet. The problem was not the hardware, or the OS per se, but the vicious circle of lack of consumer interest = lack of developer interest = lack of quality apps = lack of consumer interest.
I just wish that now the Playbook is effectively dead that RIM / BB would do the decent thing and let people root them.
That's what killed Blackberry. They got greedy and released BB10 devices at a premium price, as if the world had only been buying fruitytoys and robophones while waiting for BB10 to save them. So the Z10 here in the Colonies is priced in the iPhone range and the Q10 is costlier. Sure, it's typically only $100/200 with the standard 2-year contract, but that's iPhone or Sammy G4 territory.
There is considerable margin in their hardware. Had they priced it lower, it might have attracted new users. Those who have bought the phones seem to really like them. Instead, they died from their own hubris.
I'm convinced that was what killed them. All new OSs take time to become great, and they released the niche variant first.
If they'd released BB10 phones in early 2012, they'd have had that extra year to iterate before the Galaxy S III became a huge hit.
The brutal truth, well done Mr Orlowski. However, I still think that the crazy baboon in charge of MS will buy up BB with the temptation of a cheap and easy entry into the corporate market and integration with Office et al. This will be the baboons parting "gift" for the poor sod who has to take over after he departs.
I have to agree I really like BB10.
Like most devices you will have your personal preferences (I.e for Satnag my choice is Garmin where as others will be TomTom or other Satnag device makers). Its a shame that companies can be built up so fast as when they fall they fall hard.
But the excitement passed when I learned they will not port it to PlayBook - that seemed crazy, since without tablet who will bother coding for phones only?
Also, as much as I like my BB 9900 and was eagerly awaiting BB10 phone, Q10 lost two important hardware bits: trackpad and custom button. And without BIS I think it no longer has push email for consumers, entirely losing the one thing BB was best at.
Hope they can learn from it and improve; the company makes great hardware and it would be a pitty to lose it.
Q10 lost one other key feature, the ability to dial from the keys. It only dials telephone calls from the fondlescreen. A forum rumor has it that 10.2 will restore at least speed dialing from the physical keys. Those of us who don't like touch screens would not be happy with a phone that still demands touch-screen use for the simplest functions that real buttons do so easily.
I have to ask...what the heck were they thinking with the BB10 back-end?
The older BES setup was exactly what most businesses needed and gave both mail delivery and full control of handsets in a single package. They also had BIS for 'da yoof' to hook into their hotmail/google mail accounts.
What is the new offering? Well you have one server to control the devices another to share network files etc etc etc but as for delivering the mail??? Oh yes, and no more BIS for 'da yoof'
Just a shame that the new handsets are actually very very nice. Still, I can use on to hook into my mail server and just get the mail that way, I don't need the BB back-end any more and it seems nor does anyone else.
We run BES Express for our small business and I really like it. I have not upgraded to any OS10 handsets because it would entail leaving BES behind, it is just so useful. I don't understand why most small business are not using it, I think if they understood the security and integration of the email and Intranet just for starters use they would snap it up.
I'll get an OS10 device for the kids and have a play but there is no way will I can move the business over to them so I am stuck going up a dead end street and I think that is a great shame.
Even when the BB10 shipped it was unfinished and has tons of stuff that make me (Z10 user, 9700 user, 9000 user) wish I'd have stuck to either a Series 7 handset or adapted to something else.
Top on my list is the ability to select and delete large swathes of emails in one go. Can you do this on a Windows phone? Select, tap, tap, drag, tap, tap, drag, tap, tap, drag... ugh. Same on all other touchscreen handsets. With my 9700 I could select the first, select the last (hold shift, drag the touchpad down) and then delete all. Or "Mark all prior as read" or "Delete all prior" - such useful features.
Can't do that on the Z10, sadly. There's plenty that I miss from my Bold 9700 that didn't make the jump across the ravine to the Z10. Such a shame it didn't take off; the world will be worse off in a two-horse race. :(
Sure BB sat on their hands for far too long but they still have a credible market share. With BB10.2, they also have an ace in the hole in the shape of the Jelly Bean runtime essentially allowing any recent Android app to run. The apps are there to be had...
Coupled with the $4.7bilion buyout I would say there are options open to the market that would not mean MS could circle and devour. That would be the death knell...
I am sick of hearing naysayers write off this company - in work on a daily basis I get "Oh I don't even know if BB will be hear in 12 months time" which is purile and short sighted. They need to stick to the core strength of the business which is the platform - and that seems to be what they are aiming for. At the end of the day, the company is not is financial distress other than it has stopped making money and is eating away at itself (although this can not obviously continue). A bit of swift action from their sugar daddy could cure that, and we might see this fruit turn itself around.
I would take BES10 over Good Tech anyday...
"A bit of swift action from their sugar daddy could cure that, and we might see this fruit turn itself around"
Dream on! Blackberry are losing customers, losing market share, losing staff, losing money. Do you spot a trend in those?
Now, what have Pansonic, Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens, NEC have in common? That they couldn't make money from smartphones and one way or another got out of that business, or sold it on. Motorola couldn't make money either, and couldn't even find a buyer until Google stepped in, but whether they are here for the long haul remains to be seen. As Motorola aren't making any Nexus devices, you have to question Google's real commitment.
If this deal goes through, then we have a fading technology firm being bought by a private equity investor. There's plenty to pillage on the balance sheet, and more slashing to be done on the P&L, and residual income to be garnered over the next 18 months of decline. Burying Blackberry like that will be enough to double Fairfax's money. Why would they take a risk trying to invest several billion dollars more in a market where big, clever, well resourced firms like those name above have failed, in a company that has tried a "make or break" strategy that has resulted in a "break" outcome, and when only two handset companies in the world are actually making any worthwhile margins?
I am not saying that BB will reclimb the handset market - that is not their core strength but the current strategy to pull away from it and focus on their only growth area (i.e. BES 10) is hardly foolhardy. At the end of the day of companies like Mobile Iron and Good can build an industry off the back of BB's inactivity, you would think there is still enough head knowledge in them to re-take that market.
The last thing Prem Watsa is going to do is pick the company apart. There might be some audacious trimming of the fat but the core BB structure will stand - at the end of the day he is a fan of Blackberry - not the average private equity investor.
I think your optimism may be misplaced. Fan or no fan, BB's new overlords bought it for one reason: to make money from the business. If they find a way to make BB relevant in technology again, lovely, but they'll be just as happy if the future of BB is as a maker of plastic hamster wheels.
"a bloated public sector"
If every one is complaining of massive cuts to services how can this be?
Seems to me, everyone needs services but no one wants to pay for them, instead handing the money to buy a shiny bit of sh*t in your pocket.
Society as it stands today are shallow and selfish children who need to grow up.
For shame to those responsible for this sham.
Like it or not, yes you are responsible for everyone in the country.
" "a bloated public sector"
If every one is complaining of massive cuts to services how can this be?"
Because Labour added ~800,000 public sector employees (mostly up North of course) in their last stint of wasting tax payers' money and subsidising freeloaders...Even with drastic cuts, it takes a while to reverse that kind of profligacy...
Yeah, what a waste employing loads of people. Much better to give massive wodges of cash to people to run employment schemes that are worse than no schemes, like the MD of A4E and her 6 million quid bonus.
Hey, if we're being moronically simplistic it has to cut both ways....
"Seems to me, everyone needs services but no one wants to pay for them, instead handing the money to buy a shiny bit of sh*t in your pocket."
Not sure what remote socialist planet you're living on, but we have no f***ing choice but to pay for them. Government spending is about 40% of GDP. Nationally, of every tenner earned by business or employees, four quid is expropriated by government to spend on "services".
From where I sit those services include a completely out of control "benefits" system, which cannot even provide basic management information and which leaves many in need whilst featherbedding more than a few, an education system that overall costs roughly £6k per pupil, but gets barely half of that through to the average classroom, and health service that is a model of random disorder. And whilst out politicians bleat about poverty, they fritter £13bn a year on foreign aid, and foist an energy policy on this country that is rapidly and persistently increasing our bills.
Personally I'd rather keep my money and choose what to spend it on, although I fully recognise that you feel politicians and civil servants can spend your money better than you can.
If the choice is between the government employing people to provide services fairly inefficiently, and the current fad for handing the money to the private sector so a few get wealthy, most join the minimum wage club and the services not provided at all are quietly forgotten on ideological grounds, I'll take the bloat every time along with the reduction in benefits for 'topped up' wages. The private sector have a disgraceful record on public services in more cases than not - if they spent a bit more thought on fulfilling contracts and rather less on gouging and padding, we might get somewhere.
The public services market rhetoric is tired, old, and only differs from the other sort in where the bloat is parked.
A sad but perhaps deserved end to the company formerly known as Lawsuits in Motion.
One has to wonder how it took them almost 4 years to build something useful from the QNX platform.
I would love to hear the inside story from one or more of their developers. I have a suspicion that there must have been some major management execution failures.
Phones with 2GB RAM were even more expensive then.
If they'd released the same system then it would have been a non starter.
Perhaps if they'd made the system less of a resource hog. (And if Microsoft can do it, I have no sympathy).
They alienated existing users. Especially those with playbooks. (I'm glad I resisted the temptation)
They should have been releasing phones for at least two years that would take the new OS as a free upgrade. This would have made sure it had a decent size user base.
It should have kept BIS, too.
I bet the NSA are pleased. The last major phone OS not controlled by an American company bites the dust.
Symbian - dead, replaced by Windows phone. S40 in the package purchased by Microsoft. Meego, remnants are a minor player, as yet. Bada, canned in favour of one of Meego's remnants.
(They just need to hope/ensure Sailfish and Tizen stay forked)
"They alienated existing users. Especially those with playbooks. (I'm glad I resisted the temptation)"
I did not resist the temptation...and am one of many who were extremely hacked off when Old Thorsten baby pulled the plug on BB10 for the PB...after "assuring" owners that RIM would indeed make it available.
http://tabtimes.com/news/ittech-os-playbookblackberry/2013/01/30/blackberry-confirms-bb10-will-come-playbook-weighs-next
After that, I wouldn't own ANY BB devices, even if they did turn the company around...which will never happen.
Two years late is spot on. BB10 is technically very excellent, fast, and reliable. QNX was a great purchase decision.
But that decision should have been made in 2007, after seeing what the next generation of phones was going to be like, as demonstrated and released by Apple that year. Watching people send email on a clunky BB device in 2009, using that little trackball and waiting for UI updates was a very painful experience when the person next to them was breezing through it on an iPhone.
BB was good at corporate email and messaging. Losing both of these in a couple of years is a move of incredible incompetence. Now they'll lose the rest of their market by stopping the iOS and Android releases of the software, software that is meant to keep people on their enterprise email and messaging platforms even if they (currently) aren't using BB devices. Because by keeping the people on the platform, they can try to get the hardware right for the next cycle and entice them back. No users, no company.
"BB10 is technically very excellent, fast, and reliable"
Actually no. It's quite inefficient and insecure like Android. You need 2GB RAM and a quad core CPU for a bearable experience. It was also previously completely rooted via a Flash exploit.
Windows Phone is faster and smoother with a 1/4 of those specs...
Anonymous Coward (MSFT) wrote it:
"Actually no. It's quite inefficient and insecure like Android. You need 2GB RAM and a quad core CPU for a bearable experience."
Complete rubbish - you must be one of those industry outsiders who misinterpreted TH's words about the Playbook having only 1GB memory and he didn't want to spend the engineering resources to make BB10 smooth...
...it was 1. an excuse because PB is a DEAD PRODUCT, no future revenue would come from it 2. all he was saying he didn't want to commit sw engineers for any PB-related development (even if it's as small and trivial as simply making sure OS + apps run smooth within 1GB memory boundaries.)
" It was also previously completely rooted via a Flash exploit."
Yeah, and that was quickly fixed and never been a serious one - unlike WP's very simple WiFi exploit that MICROSOFT ACTUALLY FLAT-OUT REFUSES TO FIX, telling you to NOT TO USE WIFI instead (yes, I'm NOT kidding): http://betanews.com/2013/08/07/microsoft-warns-windows-phone-users-not-to-use-wifi-wait-what/
"Windows Phone is faster and smoother with a 1/4 of those specs..."
Aye, that's why most serious apps will not even install on those devices, right? Complete rubbish.
In reality WP runs like crap on 512MB and even if you can get some WP apps to install on a 512MB Lumia (WP apps, like anything with "Windows" in the requirements, are BIG and they come with their own requirement and most devs do not want to deal with el cheapo customers' problems) the system practically eats up everything so running apps simultaneously is a no-go or at least an utter PITA (keeps freezing/swapping etc.)
PS: it's one thing that everything you posted was downright false but why is it that you MSFT-trolls NEVER use your real names? You are such a lame trolls, seriously.
BB phones got left behind in the development race; didn't have anything new and attractive but were still expensive.
Maybe they thought there was customer loyalty.
Maybe there was, but if only a few do that peel off that was in the article, the crumble starts.
And start it did.
I had a Blackberry from 2008 until 2011, an 8900 I think it was. When I first got it (from work) I thought it was quite a nice piece of kit. I cancelled the personal phone I had at the time and loved it.
Then Blackberry app world came along. "Brilliant!" I thought. But then, every time apps needed updating you had to update them one at a time. Each individual update required rebooting the device, which for a hard reboot took several minutes. That mean if you had 10 apps installed the best part of an hour could be wasted!
Then there were all the issues which required me to pull the battery out and do a hard reboot, e.g. menu items disappearing or text becoming corrupted. Even a replacement device didn't resolve those.
To be fair, this was a few years ago so it was an older version of BB OS (can't remember which). However, my girlfriend has a BB7 device and still has a lot of similar problems. When I tried out my friend's iPhone 4 I was blown away by the comparative ease of use and stability. I bought one and haven't looked back, although I accept Android has caught up or even overtaken iOS!
The moral of the story is, if Blackberry had put more effort into usability and stability with earlier versions of BB OS they possibly wouldn't have lost me as a customer. And, I assume, many other people too!
'Tis curious that Prem Watsa stepped down from the board just a short time ago only to buy the company lock stock and barrel today. He's also on record saying less than two years ago that the company needed 3-5 years to turn around. Deep discount buy, or catching a falling knife?
Its a falling knife but hats off to Watsa. Looks like he structured the deal so he can't lose. Either he flushes out a real buyer or he picks the company up for $2Bn allowing for BlackBerry's cash hoard. He will have spent that time on the board wisely. Probably knows he can sell off the patents and QNX for more than that. Fire the remaining 12,000 employees. Sell the buildings. Job done.
By not releasing updates - I'm looking at YOU Verizon - they all but guaranteed the experience on BB10 would never improve. Not sure what RIM did to piss them off so badly, but when your "partner" has direct control over the user experience on your phone, you'd better give them a reason to support you.
The meeting for select SDK for BB10 must have went like this
Manager: OK, we have shinny new OS in the works so we need a shinny new SDK.
Developer: Well, our current SDK is based on J2me/J2SE, so maybe we just extend the APIs to leverage the new OS. Our current devs will be happy, and we will attract a good amount of Java devs who know about writing apps. You know, proper debugging, unit testing, and year really good IDE ecosystem. We would just have to do a few plugins for the top IDEs. As a matter of fact we don't even have to pay Oracle for a license, we can just role our own VM.
Manager: Hogwash, everyone knows Java is DEAD! I think Adobe has some shinny new SDK. Adobe Air, Yes, it all html5 and stuff.
Developer: But others have tried that approach for mobile and they haven't been head from since (i.e. Palm webos etc...)
Manager: Nonsense, there are 1000s more web developers than Java developers, so success will surely be ours.
Developer: Just because someone can write a webpage using html/css/JQuery doesn't mean they understand the concept of writing something that doesn't look like a web-page.
Manager: Shut-up with these nonsense facts, but for good measure we will also provide a C++ SDK since, unlike JAVA, that's not DEAD.
Developer: OK. (in his/her head: I think I saw add for mobile Java dev at Google ... Hmmm, time to send that resume out)
Few Years Go Buy then ...
Manager: So it seems the whole html5 SDK thing didn't work out as we thought and we have no apps. Any ideas?
New Developer: Well, since Google has done some good work with their JVM, lets just port it and run Androids app.
Manager: Your are a genius, now why hasn't any of the other devs thought of this before!!!! I am sure we will have thousands of apps and devs now. I see us going strait to the top.
As of Today
Manager: Well OS 10 has failed to ignite the mobile world, and oh yes company if effectively dead as a top mobile platform provider.
Right on one thing: Anyone betting mobile apps on html5 needs their head examined. It is stupid, even Apple tried that and failed (remember the original iPhone?). And burning previous SDKs is also stupid; the whole OSX transition in its time had Carbon released as a transparent transition route from Classic MacOS to OSX. And BlackBerry didn't even have the excuse of not knowing they were going down the wrong path: webOS had already crashed and burned by the time they started the BB10 transition!
Since the arrival of the iPhone, RIM fans have derided it as a "toy" and "not for serious business" blah blah blah. "Prosumer" is the same arrogant assumption, that somehow users of iPhones and Droids are not "professionals."
Guess what RIMjob, you lost. iPhones and Androids are everywhere, in every level of business. They're just as "pro" as you USED to be...but aren't anymore. And even the business "pros" don't want your antiquated junk anymore. Even WinPho is getting the security specs your aging, creaking infrastructure has. But WinPho isn't about to have week-long outages because the infrastructure is so old and bloated it can barely keep itself running.
And I say the next bit as a former RIM employee. You want to know why RIM totally missed the touchscreen boat? The blame goes squarely on the shoulders on "chief innovator" Mike Lazaridis. His gospel since the late 90's was that he hates touchscreens and so must everyone else. He alone is to blame for holding back RIM's entry into touchscreens, and even then it was hamfisted at best when it finally (and belatedly) happened. But that's what happens when the official Main Brain of the company is surrounded by bootlicking sycophants that won't stand up and say his ideas are really kind of shit.
The best way of looking at "wha happen?" to RIM is to remember those two drunken RIM morons on the plane a couple years back...they got so drunk they had to be restrained, and then they tried to chew their way through their restraints causing the plane to be turned around and coming close to inspiring an international incident. THAT little play-within-a-play is why RIM failed...drunk on past success, arrogant beyond belief, and like Wyl-E Coyote, failing to see the end of the cliff even when their feet are pedalling empty air.
I almost bought a Z10, definitely sorry to see this happen.
Nokia and RIM relied far too long on milking their existing OS, without doing much about modernizing them. Interesting how you can make the most $ money even as you are sliding into irrelevance.
Part of it was the advent of touchscreens, yes. But another part was that 10 yrs ago a phone was just a phone and its OS was a very specialized bit of kit, with only vague kinship to desktop/server operating systems and a sedate pace of evolution. So the vendor could concentrate on hardware, mostly. Those were the days.
The OS pace has gone up and apps are also a big selling point. To get apps out, you need a productive stack for developers to work it. J2ME just didn't cut it, I guess.
Compare iOS and Android's changes over the last few years with BB OS 7 and system 60 over the preceding 10.
*Two deaths and a near-zombie: MS also slept at the wheel with Win mobile 6.5 and before. They've got money and they have strong incentives to make Windows work on mobiles, so I wouldn't count them out. But if their cash pile had ONLY been the size of Nokia and Rim, it'd be another story.
...but rather QNX w/ BB10 on top of it is what makes BB as an investment interesting.
Remember the "internet of things"? It's coming and QNX is far the most advanced the most widely deployed embedded system and having BB10 as a great, inherently touch-oriented GUI on top of it, with all its SDK etc makes it the best offer any device or vehicle integrator/manufacturer can come across.
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