Thoughts Over 140 Characters

This is pretty sad. I remember owning my first Blackberry back in 2005. It was a Blackberry 8700g, and it was amazing. I had owned a number of Nokia phones before, and colleagues from other countries had recently started to get Blackberries for work. Whenever I saw how they could receive email in real time, I was completely amazed and jealous. When we finally got them I was instantly addicted. The 8700g had the then distinctive scroll wheel on the side which was the most revolutionary way to navigate a phone UI I had ever seen. I couldn’t stop using it, to the point that I quickly developed what was soon called Blackberry thumb.

The problem with RIM is not only that they failed to see how the iPhone was going to transform the mobile landscape in the coming years, but more importantly that their products today are basically the same they were 7 years ago. Sure, they replaced the scroll wheel on the side with a trackball on the front of the device, and later with a mini touchpad; their devices are faster and have better screen resolutions, better cameras, more capacity and added features (WiFi, GPS…); but they are essentially the same. The UI hasn’t changed much. Their attempts at a full touchscreen experience have failed dramatically. Their OS is so outdated that you still have to reboot the phone to install and uninstall applications (I mean, seriously?). Their only hope for a modern experience is Blackberry 10, but unfortunately that seems to be coming way too late and with too severe limitations.

Jonathan Geller, BGR:

For starters, RIM still can’t get BlackBerry Messenger working with more than one PIN on BlackBerry 10, and support for BES email will be replaced by ActiveSync going forward. That’s right — your corporate email, calendar and contacts will sync directly from a Microsoft Exchange server to your device.

This means RIM is completely giving up its software differentiation—BES and BBM are their main assets. How will the email experience be any better on a Blackberry smartphone than on any other smartphone in the market when they all use ActiveSync? How will the enterprise react to that, given that RIM’s biggest selling point is BES’s security and control? Why would any current Blackberry user upgrade to a new Blackberry device with a new Blackberry OS and give up on BBM?

At this point I have no hope of anything good coming out of RIM in the future. I believe they will eventually sell the company—though I’m not sure who would want it at this point—give up on their OS and technology and embrace either Android, Windows Phone 7 or webOS, or scrap their hardware and OS business and build BES clients for iOS, Android and other mobile operating systems. I believe the latter would be the best alternative for RIM.

However I don’t think RIM’s executives will ever acknowledge how deeply screwed they are. I can only agree with Marco Arment on his assessment of RIM’s current situation:

“Someone else can take it from here.”