Originally Posted by Corpulent One

I tend to think the decline of forum presence is an effect of the company's problems rather than a cause. Alienating independent developers with the secret unrooting done by the August 2010 update, plus the lack of released SDK for writing apps to use the e-ink side, was the fatal mistake. It's tough for a startup to compete in this market regardless, but an interested and engaged developer community would have been a serious boon to EE. Developers like to play with interesting technology, and the Edge represented some quite interesting and unique technology.