Senor RIM exec begs CEOs to shape up...has it fallen on deaf ears?

[=X=]

Unless you have been living under a rock, you've might have noticed RIM has been taking a lot of heat for their struggling business. For some time RIM has been losing market share to iPhone and especially Android. Yet RIM seemingly did nothing but stick to their old ways and trudge along. Threatening the company from going to obscurity.

According to BGR a senor exec in a desperate plea has written an Open letter to RIM. BGR claims to have verified that the letter truly is from a high ranking exec at RIM.

Open letter to BlackBerry bosses: Senior RIM exec tells all as company crumbles around him


To the RIM Senior Management Team:

I have lost confidence.

While I hide it at work, my passion has been sapped. I know I am not alone — the sentiment is widespread and it includes people within your own teams.

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RIM’s Response to “Open Letter”

It is obviously difficult to address anonymous commentary and it is particularly difficult to believe that a “high level employee” in good standing with the company would choose to anonymously publish a letter on the web rather than engage their fellow executives in a constructive manner...
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To be frank, it's quite sad as I loved my BB when I had one. I ended up jumping ship a year ago because I saw no effort in BB product and watch as Android phones and iPhones got better and better, while BB pretty much stayed the same.



=X=

[CazMar]

I somehow think that the BB fan in our household (hint: it's not me!) is contemplating going over to an Android device when the BB gives up the ghost. He has been so annoyed by some issues and has just about given up even attempting to get some features to work properly.

[RockdaMan]

One trick ponies.

[afv011]

In this cut-throat market, you can't expect to survive when you churn out 90s-looking devices when Android & Apple have sexy phones with all the features and apps you'll ever need. It is innovate or die, and RIM seem to be doing the latter rather than the former.

[lestatar]

Originally Posted by RockdaMan

One trick ponies.

Perhaps indeed.

However, RIM and Blackberry is the absolute best in terms of what they do for their traditionally targeted customer base:

the corporate world.

IMO/IME, a huge part of the struggle RIM now faces is their desire to capture the retail consumer market. They want more but from the perspective of an average retail consumer, sure, iPhone and the like are a helluva lot sexier than BB. Duh!

As for their positioning in the corporate world? I see no evidence of mass, organization-wide defections away from RIM to either Apple or Android or any other internal corporate mobile platform.

Sure, lots of company's are "looking" at iPads and iPhones. But most all of this is just vanity driven, with the requests coming from senior people who simply want a schmexier-looking device.

When the time for the real heavy lifting comes, and more rational decision makers are heard, I believe it will still be the continuing VITAL, MISSION CRITICAL concerns of overall device and infrastructure security, tight integration, platform and device stability and extensive corporate IT control which will rule the day. And in these areas, BB/RIM is without peer.

Similarly, I see no corporate entities rushing out to ditch their WinXP/WinXX desktops in favor of iOS or Linux, certainly not in any widespread manner.

Eventually...perhaps - who knows? But big business is universally conservative, especially in terms of their technology deployments. They HAVE to be. So any widespread paradigm changes in the corporate world will come crawling and with significant pain and after endless rounds of consideration.

Of course, all of the above is simply a reflection of what I have observed in the corporate world and in my current discussions with other corporate folks.



I will throw this out though: As a corporate BB user for 10+ years, I challenge anyone to compose more accurate, speedy and typo-free emails than I can while on my BB against those using a touchscreen device like iPhone, etc...

I am talking about average users of both RIM and touch-input devices of a similar size [no unfair BB vs iPad comparisons and no superfreak geeks].

[Namekuseijin]

Oh, I can "type" pretty fast and typo-free on my android via swype. Like this. Pretty fast, I guess, when compared to typing with fingernails on tiny keyboards...

[lestatar]

^ lol. OK, fair enough since this is a test we will never be able to try in person

Still, I have yet to meet anyone in real life who can match me for speed and accuracy and in my business I meet A LOT of people from all walks of life and nearly all levels of professional achievement. And I myself am not even that particularly fast - just pretty well familiar with BB after so many years usage.

To be fair [and to prove I am not such an old fashioned curmudgeon stuck on BB], I have seen amazing vids of speedfreaks using touchscreens. But I gotta believe that those folks, just like people who can speed type at 70wpm and higher are in the vast minority.

One area where touchscreen input is clearly superior though is for Asian based languages - for those, the swipe recognition is without peer from what I have observed. Here in HK people can be incredibly quick while writing Chinese characters.

And FWIW, no fingernails typing for me ever on BB keyboard lols My fingers are normal average male size and I keep my nails nice and tidy.

@Namekuseijin, just out of curiosity, have you ever tried a Blackberry keypad?

[=X=]

Response

I remember a few years back everybody I knew in the corporate world owned a BB, sure they thought iPhones where sexy, but old reliable was the blackberry. This was true for myself. I had a storm and thought there was no ways BB physical keyboard could type as fast as me.

I resisted the android platform or iphone ad they had no appeal to me. However out if frustration with RIMs lack of meeting users demands i jumped in the android platform. Wow the difference is night and day. I thought nothing could compete with the sure type technology only to find keyboards like swype and swiftkey knock the socks of of suretype.

Right know what I see in the corporate world and at large is that no one deceive dominates the scene, like BB once did. There are iPhones,BB, and androids(more android than any other device)

Did your know the world record for typing was broken using swype? And while you discredit those folks as being freaks have you ever considered why there is no similar record for bb users despite the fact that every bb owner swears that they are lightened fast on their preferred device? The point I'm making here really isn't about platform superiority but humans nature inclination to obscure the truth instead if changing.... which is the point of this post.

Btw this was typed on my android device.

[=X=]

It looks like the story continues to unfold. BGR has now posted a series of email they received from RIM employees.

After we published the article, RIM responded. It wasn’t pretty, and it really didn’t address a single point that was made by the original plea.
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After reading the emails posted by BGR I guess it's no surprise the company is struggling.

=X=

[RainingLemur]

I like RIM. I would like to see them make a strong push into the market again, instead of stagnating and kind of fading out.

[OtterBooks]

I can't imagine anyone buying a Blackberry these days, unless they're really attached to the brand from years of use.

[Richey79]

Originally Posted by =X=

Response

I remember a few years back everybody I knew in the corporate world owned a BB, sure they thought iPhones where sexy, but old reliable was the blackberry. This was true for myself. I had a storm and thought there was no ways BB physical keyboard could type as fast as me.

I resisted the android platform or iphone ad they had no appeal to me. However out if frustration with RIMs lack of meeting users demands i jumped in the android platform. Wow the difference is night and day. I thought nothing could compete with the sure type technology only to find keyboards like swype and swiftkey knock the socks of of suretype.

Right know what I see in the corporate world and at large is that no one deceive dominates the scene, like BB once did. There are iPhones,BB, and androids(more android than any other device)

Did your know the world record for typing was broken using swype? And while you discredit those folks as being freaks have you ever considered why there is no similar record for bb users despite the fact that every bb owner swears that they are lightened fast on their preferred device? The point I'm making here really isn't about platform superiority but humans nature inclination to obscure the truth instead if changing.... which is the point of this post.

Btw this was typed on my android device.

Love the intentional irony here.

It was intentional ... right?

First things to do when you move to a touch screen keypad: turn off the heinous autocorrect, slow down and give what you've written a quick proof-read.

[lestatar]

@X: Hey, it's all good man. I simply don't engage in forum pee-ing matches - rather I just call 'em as I personally see 'em, day in and day out, as viewed through the lens and perspective of many years of mid-relatively high-level corporate IT decision-making processes.

Let's leave it at that, shall we?

And point taken about the world record for typing vs swiping. I was not aware of this so thank you for the info - I am now better educated.

Still, a world record is quite irrelevant out in the real world, no? How many people do you know that drive at 200mph? Or who can eat 50 hotdogs in 5minutes? I was specifically referring to the demonstrated typing skills of average man/woman on the street users of BBs and touch devices.

And until the mass defections away from RIM actually start in the corporate world, I remain unconvinced of BB's imminent demise. Having said that, I fully acknowledge that BB is far from perfect - I never said it was and quite frankly, I am way too old and cynical to be a fanboi. Indeed, I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiments expressed in the open letter you linked to.

cheers man,
-les

[RockdaMan]

Originally Posted by lestatar

I see no evidence of mass, organization-wide defections away from RIM

So here is what the corporate world says about RIM:

Right now, right now, the salient fact is that most of us use BlackBerry because we have to. We don’t love it; there’s no “wow factor.” Business suites, including IT managers and security-minded customers like investment bankers, buy the BlackBerry because it promises security, reliability, and – a very important ongoing asset for RIM – integration, as BlackBerry synchronizes seamlessly with office email.

Yet even those brand assets are fading. Quality has decreased over the years, vitiating the brand in one of the areas that matters most – reliability. If RIM remains the industry-leader for seamless integration, it’s because the company still has the best enterprise servers, supported by savvy support personnel who know those servers inside and out.

But it is a near certainty that other manufacturers will catch up on this front as well. When they do, will RIM have added anything to this core asset that will keep them a competitive step ahead? If not, it is an additionally perilous omission since tomorrow’s state-of-the-art enterprise servers will likely be designed for Android phones and iPhones as well.

http://blogs.forbes.com/richardlevic...-apple-moment/

RIM hasn't released a new BlackBerry model for nearly a year as it tries to rejuvenate a product line that's been criticized as under-powered and stodgy.

It's seen its share of sales in the benchmark North American market fall to 16.5% at the end of the first quarter of 2011 from 41.3% in the year earlier period, according to research firm Gartner.

In April, RIM issued a first-quarter profit warnings saying it saw weaker-than-expected sales in the U.S. as well as Latin America, one of the fastest-growing markets for the BlackBerry in recent years.

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-...16-714130.html

[anamardoll]

I think RIM needs to make changes, but at the same time a lot of that letter read like "why can't we be more like Apple?" even when it doesn't quite...make sense. The bit about no one buying Product B just because it had features that Product A didn't made me laugh -- apparently this letter writer needs to meet me, because that's pretty much how I make ALL my buying decisions. (See also, my blog post about how the N2 unveiling caused me to rush out and buy a Sony reader. Ha.)

Definitely RIM needs good dev tools and relationships. I agree with that 100%. But some of the rest of it... like how many people want Flash, really?... yeah, no. I disagree with that.

I loved my BB. Biggest reason I dropped it for Android was lack of apps, particularly a good eReading app. Otherwise, I loved the phone intensely. (And, incidentally, an RIM letter riffing on Android tickles me so very much.)