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.
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.
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.
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!
If I was in charge of strategy at Microsoft I'd have doubled down on WP7 for the enterprise market - the company that brought the enterprise their OS, their Office suite, their .NET dev framework and even their little-loved Exchange server really ought to be able to steal huge chunks of market share from RIM. Even if the actual tangible connections between the products are minimal, MS ought to have had a more buzzword-laden pitch which appeals to enterprise decision makers more than "actually, it's really easy to develop for"
Agreed. There's a big market the android and ios fans seem to be ignoring a bit - small/medium businesses with a need for mobile devices and custom apps. The iOS "100 device limit" is pretty annoying and trying to deploy a custom add via 'ad-hoc' is certainly not a simple process (yet?) HPalm could/should be targeting SMBs and developers with an inexpensive tablet that is easy to write for. A $299 price point for a webOS tablet would be fantastic - JS-based development, web-based deployment, low-cost devices, etc. It's a pipe-dream right now, though, because everyone seems to still be focusing on "consumer-focused app stores".
Prediction: Apple will probably quietly introduce SMB-focused changes in the next year to make it stupidly simple to create custom apps and distribute to iOS devices outside of the App Store, then everyone else will spend 3 years chasing that angle. :/
I'm not sure if that will do any good - you see Blackberrys are killer on messaging not apps. The answer to the Blackberry question is more server-side than client-side.
I know your point was enterprise IT, but allow me to illustrate with a consumer example. The same reasoning applies.
Here in India, I see most of the hip young crowd carrying Blackberrys. Note that unlocked, grey-market iPhones are available in India at not-too-deterring prices. But Blackberrys are defacto, and all you see people doing is message, message, message.
We have some of the rock bottom rates on calls and SMS - yet you can buy a fixed-rate Blackberry messenger subscription at nearly every service provider in India which lets you do unlimited group messaging (irrespective of domestic or international). I think you can also group-message a certain number of multimedia items.
Now that is something that not even Apple has cracked. The system is seamless.
<begin prediction consumer> The only competition to Blackberry in the hip-messaging market will come with the Facebook phone which will seamlessly integrate the mobile angle to the Facebook Messaging platform. </end prediction consumer>
<begin prediction enterprise> R.I.M can only be broken by the final integration of Google Voice, Gizmo5, Slide/Disco and some form of video chat into Android. The notification-bar on Android is simply custom built for messaging notifications. </end prediction enterprise>
I'd say you've hit on the one reason that RIM hasn't actually died yet. :-) They really seem to be coasting along on that single advantage, which does not look good for the company's long-term outlook.
It was for IBM, by abandoning trying to compete with DELL selling zero margin laptops to home users and sticking to selling $Bn systems to $Bn clients for $Bn they have a recipe for making $Bn
This is Palm we're talking about. I don't know about you, but when I hear "Palm", I immediately think of people in suits and ties squinting at little screens to see where their next meetings are. Palm traditionally sold products to business people.
If memory serves, before RIM moved in, Palm owned the enterprise handheld market. They could do it again if they tried.
Why is this comment being downvoted? That site linked was actually a site where RIM were advertising jobs. Of course lots of people make the obvious joke about it, but I don't think the comment deserves downvoting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think RIM are going to do a Sega/Psion. They can't compete on devices and will wind up delivering cloud-based services for other mobile platforms alongside running a nice little business licensing QNX for embedded stuff.
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...
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.
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.
So, they have the cost of integrating their platform with Android, and ... what benefit, exactly, over just using Android?
Obviously, if you can avoid being commoditized by maintaining your own software platform, that's great. I just don't see that RIM is bringing anything to the table with their OS:
http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=2263882
What benefit would they have with their own, incompatible with anything else, platform?
This way they can build differentiation full Android stack integrators can't. That, of course, if QNX proves a better environment than Linux.
This is, BTW, the same strategy Microsoft adopted eons ago, when the de-facto standard business OS was CP/M. It was very easy to port your programs from CP/M to MS-DOS (thanks, in no small part, to Intel making the 8086 asm-source compatible with the 8085) and that allowed them to have a reasonable software base from the start. Unfortunately, for CP/M, this was a one way road - it was not as easy to port back.
If Rim can manage a superset of Android, they may have a fighting chance to differentiate themselves.
I don't see having an exclusive platform as an advantage right now. If they could pull off iOS API compatibility, that would be brilliant (assuming their patent cross licensing with Apple adequately covered their asses) and could be conceivably be done starting with GNUStep, but Android seems a good second-best option.
OTOH, I believe the Apple app store TOS would prohibit any in-store app to be distributed in any way other than the store, so, there is one interesting contractual risk.
For phones, sure, but certainly not for tablets. By the time that consumers can actually buy RIM's PlayBook tablet, how many developers will still be writing tablet apps for Android 2.3? All Android tablets that have any chance of taking market share from the iPad run Android 3 (Motorola's Xoom, Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1, etc).
And yet Apple also trumpeted the numbers of apps available for the iPad on launch, despite the vast majority of these being iPhone or iPod Touch apps not optimised for the tablet.
That was a year ago, when they had no competition. Now the iPad has 65,000 apps optimized for its form factor. You don't get to compete with last year and still win.
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.
Thanks for asking. I'm not saying having oen or two CEOs for a company is good or bad, I'm saying the post is trollish and doesn't deserve to be in HN. Let's see: it has no content, only an opinion that a company is going to do badly because something the co-CEO said and because their new product is going to have a feature (android) that gosh, is not the latest version. Also the original author mentions having two CEOs as a big deal but there's no indication of this being a problem in the past, it's like a tabloid article.
The problem is that any post talking about android, mobile, RIM, Apple, tablet is "hot" and likely to get upvoted even if it's crappy.
Since people seem to think that I am in the wrong so fine, I've been in HN since the beginning, tried to do by humble contributions but there's a lot of aggression and the quality of posts has nosedived. I guess I don't belong, so I'll exit quietly.
More downvoted than upvoted that's all, i voted you up.
It is oppressive that if enough people don't like what you have to say they can remove your ability to post.
Post mainly stuff that people like and you'll be able to weather some unpopularity without risking being shut up.
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.
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.
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.
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!
</wannabe pundit>