Some people have accused this blog of being a bit unfair to RIM. This could not be further from the truth. I write about the makers of the once-ubiquitous Blackberry because I want to see them return to greatness, and I hate seeing them make obvious missteps. Having sat through the death of Palm, I really don’t want to live through that again, which makes the barrage of bad news out of Toronto even sadder.
It started with rumors of yet another round of firings, this time on high levels. Then came yet another disappointing earnings statement.This was followed by the resignation of their Co-CEO, retirement of their CTO, and the news that their COO would be “pursuing other interests.”
Mommy, what's a "euphemism"?
We had already been given the disappointing news that no Blackberry 10 devices would be coming out until the end of 2012. Now, we’ve been informed that they’re giving up on the consumer market altogether. With a 25 percent drop in revenues in the last quarter, one could argue that the consumer market has already given up on RIM.
On the plus side though, you’ll probably be able to snap the Playbook up on closeout soon.
2.0: Now with actual functionality!
Update: RIM has been hitting the aether to assure folks that they are actually not ditching the consumer market, but rather refocusing on the enterprise segment. Or, as Patrick Spence, RIM’s managing director of Global Sales & Regional Marketing. told Pocket-lint:
“While we announced plans to re-focus our efforts on our core strengths, and on our enterprise customer base, we were very explicit that we will continue to build on our strengths to go after targeted consumer segments. We listed BBM, as well as the security and manageability of our platform, among these strengths.”
Honestly, this sounds like a heck of a lot of spin.
I, for one, won’t really miss them if they go. I’ve done support for several of my clients (primarily law firms) who use Blackberry phones exclusively, and the initial setup is almost always a hassle because the phones require proper provisioning from the cellular carrier before they’ll work with a company’s Exchange mail server. (I’ve found that the menu option you need to select to configure one in this manner is physically not even present until the provider configures things on their end so it appears as a selection.)
Another issue I have with them is the current version of “Blackberry Desktop” for Windows no longer supports syncing email with a copy of Outlook running on the desktop. That means Blackberry users are now cut off from receiving their corporate email if the company’s Exchange server doesn’t have the BES plug-in installed on it so they can connect to it directly. Why would RIM remove a feature like that with a new release, instead of ADDING features?