RIM implodes: announces layoffs, 500,000 PlayBooks shipped
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It took about 3 years for most of the competition to catch up to what the iPhone launched as. Microsoft kept trying to ride the WP 6 train hoping the iPhone was going to flop and not become the next iPod. Eventually they had to do a major rewrite which put them a few years behind of iPhone. Oops. Blackberry Storm and Torch are both still below par and not even competitive against Android devices, let alone iPhone. Nokia never caught up at all with the iPhone.
Similar story is playing out with the iPad. Android is catching up on hardware, but not software ecosystem. Maybe that will be different in a year, but the market could certainly shape up to be more like the iPod dominance of music players than the iPhone/Android dominance of phones. Windows 8 will launch when? 2 or 3 years after the iPad. Sound familiar? Blackberry Playbook is out, but that's such a mess it's not worth discussing.
Steve Jobs was right back in 2007 and most of the market is still 2-3 years behind where Apple is.
1. No OS license costs 2 plugged into java dev ecosystem which has large dev base 3 Mobile Operators love android OEM terms
Android app store outright sucks. Many minor usability things on android are annoying. I don't think Android is 'winning' but I do think they are shipping a lot of handsets. IMO there is a distinction.
Chevy 'wins' over Bentley. Which would you rather drive?
I want to use that. It's applicable to more than just phones and cars.
Haha, I used a similar metaphor and posted at almost the same time. Great minds think alike?
According to a random internet article, iPhone accounts for less than 3% of phones shipped, but 40% of the profits.
iPhones make more dollars.
edit apparently Apple's mobile market share is up to 4% with more than 50% of the profits.
Which would you rather buy? And this is important, with things like the $350 Vizio tablet. Bentley's are nice, but I wouldn't buy one.
And given this is a dev focused site -- do you want to make accessories that work in Chevys or Bentleys?
There may be more Android phones, but mobile web usage of iOS (or even just iPhone) dwarfs that of Android. Ditto with app purchasing/usage.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-US-daily-20110518-20110...
Globally it looks set to overtake in the next few weeks (it's a couple of percent above just iPhone, but 4.5% iPod Touch share keeps mobile iOS slightly ahead), though both are trailing Symbian by some distance on that global measure.
http://www.netmarketshare.com/2010/07/01/iOS-vs-Android-in-B...
UPDATE: Ahh, I see the problem. You linked to a OS market share graph, not a browsing market share. I didn't dispute there are more Android devices, I said the iOS devices are used to browse the web much more than the Android devices, even if they are fewer. Also, not including iPad share by StatCounter is silly. The iPad's browsing share is quite large.
I could put the difference down to just iPads, which apparently have much higher browsing rates than mobile devices, but the numbers don't agree there either e.g. my source has iOS as lower than Linux whereas your numbers has it as twice as high.
(Once you add iPad numbers you start to wonder why netbooks aren't included and then the fact that iOS and Android numbers total are dwarfed by any single version of IE begins to make it seem ridiculous.)
Depends on the accessories I want to sell.
I don't get why fanboys of each platform wants the other to die... The worst thing that could happen is a smartphone platform monopoly... Hello stagnation... Hello nineties...
Depending on how you want to measure it, Chevy or Bentley, Android or iOS, both "win" for some definition of "win".
However, those things don't seem to matter as much with stand-alone devices that are sold sans-contract, such as the tablet market. Nobody could outmarket and outsell the iPod when they went head to head. Didn't matter if the device was cheaper or better, iPod outsold them. If the tablet market dynamics are similar, Android won't fare as well on tablets as it does on phones.
Simply put, if the and Android tablet is the same price as an iPad, most consumers will buy the iPad. All Apple products are seen as expensive luxury goods. Nerds might disagree, but that's how people tend to view Apple.
If you could buy a BMW for the same price as a Chevy, you'd probably buy the BMW. Most people would.
Most people buy into Android phones because iPhone is only available on 2 carriers. If iPhone was available on all carriers, Android phone sales would be much, much less.
Sales figures in countries outside the USA where the iphone is on all networks shows that statement to be extremely unlikely to be true in the USA
OTOH all indications are that when in stock the iphone kills android head to head. The conventional wisdom was that this happened on AT&T because if you were with sprint or verizon and wanted an iphone you left and went to AT&T. This again was half true. However the other half was that when the iPhone came to Verizon it killed Android head to head again.
- non-techy Facebook friend of mine a couple days ago.
The iPhone is available on all carriers in my country (Australia) and Android is outselling it.
This is due to a number of factors, but two factors appear to be critical:
1) Lower Priced Android handsets undercut Apple at the low end.
2) The iPhone 4 is now regarded as an old handset at the high end. Sales of high-end Android handsets appear to be competitive with iPhone sales on their own, at the same price point (ie, even without the low-end advantage Android might be outselling the iPhone at the high end. This is difficult to judge, because of the mid-range Android phones, and price discounting on older high-end Android phones. For example, the Samsung Galaxy S (not S2) is now available at around half the price of an iPhone 4, but a year ago was directly comparable)
(1) it came close to parity with the iphone quickly.
(2) the flexible licensing model allowed Android to leverage supply perfectly and compete at every price point from $700+ superphones down to sub $100 budget phones and everything in between all the time with new releases every week on any carrier in the world. If you can only build X million iphones in quarter x and the smartphone market is 100 million phones that quarter you can only get X% at best. It looks like X was around 15-20%.
Now for the 80%+ of the market Apple couldn't even hope to address:
WebOS beat Android by a couple months at (1) but failed miserably at (2). By launching a CDMA phone on Sprint only you're fighting over a tiny slice of a tiny slice of the pie (low single digit percent of the entire world).
Microsoft took 18 months too long to deliver (1) but brings most of (2) (supposedly they are targeting high end only but Android currently out high ends them). Many have written them off I'm not one of them.
RIM had arguably the best brand pre-Aple but they are only now (and only on tablets) starting to deliver on (1) and were just as limited as Apple on (2).
Nokia had all the supply they could want but categorically failed at putting out an iOS/WebOS/Android/WP7 quality product.
So looking again at those hypothetical 100 million devices, 15%+ Apple, 15%+ RIM, Less then 10% total WebOS/WP7/old Windows Mobile/other and the other ~60% started with Nokia and month by month was slowly eaten by Android (prolly 40-20 Android by now)
I think long term platform is irrelevant, for the most part your phone (and computer and tv and everything) will just decode an HD video stream from the cloud where datacenters crunch everything and send it at low pings over true 4G or mesh networks. ARM processors are already good enough to do this, the networks are "a few" years away. Google's got a huge lead over everyone at cloud but they're giving the OS away. Apple will make money because they will continue to make easy to use software (and poss good looking hardware).
The interesting question is will the person who bought a Galaxy Mini upgrade to a Galaxy SIII or an iPhone 5 in a couple of years time.
There are many decisions Jobs and company have made that for me has made Android look more attractive. I currently own an iPhone and have so for over a year now, but there are things I want it to do that it can not while Android can. When my contract is up Im getting a Nexus or EVO.
I want to enjoy flash, i want to truly run apps in the background, i want the ability to have voice search on home screen via click of a button, i dont want to have to go through sync process when i connect iPhone ( i dont want to find out how to stop sync), I want Google's awesome built in GPS and I want the ability for more customization.
Ive enjoyed my iPhone but playing with girlfriend's Droid X2 and her prior Droid Incredible just showed me Im on the wrong platform. Though Apple's customer service is almost unmatched - will miss that.
They have hordes of cash now but to me with what I mentioned above maybe Apple is truly headed down and destined to repeat it's own history?
I don't think Apple is headed the way of 90s Apple. That was a disaster because Jobs left the company and left a bunch of clueless idiots in charge of everything. I'm sure Apple will decline, but I don't think 90s Apple will be back anytime soon.
And even though you've probably heard this a million times, I'm going to type it: Apple makes features really nice. For example, they weren't the first with Cut/Copy/Paste, but they made it really nice and usable. That sounds really fanboy-ish, but it's true. Multitasking, notifications, even the iOS design itself.
Bare in mind that although Android outsells iPhone's, Apple still has 40% of the profit of the entire smartphone industry.
To each his own.
This is really the important statement. Phones are in a state now that I think we can actually have 3 viable OSes in the market. I know families where the dad has a BB, the mom an iPhone, and a child an Android (or Sidekick back in the day), and no one cares. It's not like PCs.
When I go and look at a WebOS device or WP7 I'm not worried about the fact that they have small market share. For the most part it doesn't matter that much to me as a consumer. Sure WP7 only has 20,000 apps. But unless you're Robert Scoble, you'll be more than happy (and if you're Robert Scoble, apps don't even count until you hit 500k).
It's a very different world, and I think we'll see things evolve quite differently.
Partially, and partially to indicate that the way Apple is doing things must be at least somewhat right and sustainable.
Why is it so hard for Android manufacturers to release updates for their phones? Because they don't make enough on them to continue supporting them. They make money on new devices sales, so they keep churning out more new handsets.
Just an odd concern for an end user, IMO. When I go to buy a car I don't look at the profits of Honda vs Ford. Sure you may not want a company that will go bankrupt, but even if they did the impact really isn't all that huge.
Why is it so hard for Android manufacturers to release updates for their phones?
Because they make deeply integrated skins. They have to reintegrate the skin with a new drop from Google -- not on their schedule, but on Google's (that's when customers start screaming for the update).
Because they don't make enough on them to continue supporting them. They make money on new devices sales, so they keep churning out more new handsets.
Everyone makes money on new device sales. The difference is if you get an iOS device -- Apple gets the profit. HTC/Samsung/Moto/LG/etc have to compete for the next sale, even if you've already decided it will be Android.
Apple is ridding the wave, releasing kick-ass products one after another; but you never know how tomorrow will look like for Apple. On the other hand, if Samsung stops making Android devices or goes out of business, there are others to fill in.
So it's not really so cut and dry.
About as odd as end users concerned about which OS has a more true multi-tasking implementation. Those who mention the profitability of iOS devices as a plus are probably about as numerous as those who mention multi-tasking.
"Everyone makes money on new device sales."
I think you misunderstood. I never said Android manufacturers aren't making money, I said they aren't making enough to support the device as long as people would like:
"Because they don't make enough on them to continue supporting them."
These are both uncommon concerns, to be sure, but they're not both odd.
The difference is that the former has no direct effect on the user experience, at best it's an enabler for continued updates.
There might well be a use for the phone in which true multitasking is desired, if you need that use then wanting the feature is no more 'odd' than someone wanting a plumber's snake because they're a plumber.
The GP's car analogy falls apart here because when I buy a car, unless I'm an after-market modder, I don't plan to add more functionality to the car. Instead, I expect the car to continue to work as I bought it (aside from normal wear and tear of course), regardless of what other cars are on the highway. I expect my phone, on the other hand, to be able to run the latest and greatest apps and games, so when another platform keeps getting all the shiny apps, it impacts my user experience.
Yes, "true" multitasking might be a desired feature for some people, in which case it should be weighted accordingly. But it's not anymore odd to consider a company's profitability as a decision factor.
The funny thing is, nobody had that expectation until the iPhone came along. Score one for Apple.
Not true. Apple making a huge profit says nothing about your ability to make a profit. XBox wasn't profitable for a long time, yet game devs have made tons of money from it. In contrast the Wii was FAR more profitable out the gate, but the attach rate is much lower than the XBox360.
So XBox360 has a bigger ecosystem, better attach rate, higher quality games -- yet was less profitable than the Wii. How can that be? Because profit != ecosystem.
Yes, "true" multitasking might be a desired feature for some people, in which case it should be weighted accordingly. But it's not anymore odd to consider a company's profitability as a decision factor.
Again, a company's profitability says nothing about the phone or the app ecosystem. The ONLY thing it says is that Apple has huge margins which it has obtained through very good deals with the carriers. End users buying phones are paying about the same price for Android or iPhone devices. They all pretty much range from $50-$250 dollars on contract.
And while Android may not have the margins that the iPhone does, do you think anyone goes into a Verizon and thinks -- what if Google goes bankrupt?
I was saying that you probably wouldn't want to buy from a bankrupt company (psychological), which is the figure you cited. But I point out that even if you did the impact wouldn't be that huge. The impact you point out is to sales, not the actual consumer.
There are several reasons why this is the case:
1) Your warranty is almost certainly not owned by the company, but rather another company who will continue to fulfill it.
2) Service centers will continue to thrive. In fact sales are often loss leaders so that they can host authorized service centers.
3) AAA has almost all of the services provided by most car companies.
4) Parts for discontinued cars can still be made, and often/usually are.
Most people have virtually no contact with the corporation after they purchse their cars.
so yes, going bankrupt will have a huge impact on Ford's bottomline. But if you bought a Ford car today and tomorrow they went bankrupt, the impact on you, as the average consumer, will be close to zero.
I would argue that if skin development is introducing even the slightest delay into the release cycle, they should cut it out ASAP.
RIM collapsed this quarter but for keen market watchers its fate was clearly shown when its profit per unite slipped with no significant unit gain.
The same goes for Apple, when iPhone has to be sold at a discount but market share does not go up noticeably, Apple is in trouble. For now iPhone enjoys a better half of the entire industry profit while ARP goes up and defies seasonal fluctuation.
>Bare [sic] in mind that although Android outsells iPhone's,
>Apple still has 40% of the profit of the entire
>smartphone industry.
Usually, unless there are serious switching costs (see Microsoft-of-the-90s), production learning curves (see Exxon), etc, excess profits invite high levels of competition and the mobile market seems pretty crazily competitive and innovative right now. (HTC 3D?! Gimmicky? Sure. Super cool? Totally!)
Currently yes the app store does have all the latest games and that makes sense as iPhone users were previous iTunes users. Unfortunately, i think Android draws more the non music buyers who used p2p and are looking for free ride - not all but a good majority. I think a useful study would be iPhone and their P2P usage(always, rarely - iTunes instead or never pirate iTunes buyer always) vs. Android users & their P2P usage(always, rarely - use iTunes instead or never pirate iTunes buyer always). I think you would see why apps are developed first for the iPhone and sometimes only for the iPhone. Even with a bigger market share Android developers are not making the mint iPhone developers have been and continue to make. iPhone owners are of a different mind-set/demographic (for the most part) i am thinking. Also Android's marketplace is a mess comparatively.
Overall i was an Apple iPhone fanboy but the tons and tons of Android phones are outpacing Apple's prior innovations.
1. http://www.laptopmag.com/review/cell-phones/motorola-droid-x...
and one important thing in the next line: and 5:39 for the average smartphone.
So it's pretty much in line with what the parent posted...
Games or heavy wifi browsing can easily eat into your battery life in several hours, regardless of the phone.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4424/hp-veer-4g-review-getting...
edit: replaced single chart with link to page with 3 charts.
In defense of the OP he may have a 3GS which is not far from Droid X2 on these charts.
The iPhone 4 is much better than either of those in terms of battery life and performance. Mine lasts about two days on one charge, whereas my previous iPhone, the 3G, barely lasted a day. The new phone is also much faster.
They can charge a high margin because of a lack of suitable replacements. That there is a lack of suitable replacements means the product (which consumers evidently highly value) very well might not exist if not for that company making it. Companies that make high quality products being rewarded with profit is something that encourages other companies to make high quality products.
"Shouldn't this make you less trusting of Apple and their intentions instead?"
No. My default assumption is that the intentions of every for profit company is to maximize their profits. Maximum profit determines the price a product will sell at and a company that sells at a price that minimizes profit will quickly find itself in bankruptcy court.
Due to shifting exchange rates it might cost Apple 5 bucks more or less to make the exact same ipad next month and their profits will increase or decrease accordingly but that doesn't have any impact on the buyer who gets the exact same ipad.
And the consistent 2nd and 3rd place by this metric are Nokia and RIM, both gently falling below 20% each over the last year, who most people consider to be dead ducks.
Flash, customization et al can be personal preference. I don't even want custom ringtone and wallpaper is silly to me. Oh and flash is fading, even Adobe knows it.
iOS multitasking leaves a lot to be desired. So is Android's approach(modern smartphone battery life sucks period, Android sucks spectacularly, largely due to its Laissez-faire multitasking and widget management.). The same for notification systems, now they are pretty much the same and I'll still say they both kinda suck, iOS went from sucks hairy dunkey balls to just suck a little less than Android.
Lately I feel iOS busy plugging holes and Android becomes more and more desktop-esque and hateful (feature wise even Honeycomb didn't bring much to the table). I still prefer iOS and find WP7 more interesting than both of them, for now. Though I dislike Metro's animation abuse with a passion.
First, there's only THE iPhone. When Nokia was the biggest manufacture of mobile phones in the world they released 10-20 phones a year. There's a reason for that, people have different budgets and people don't want to have the same phone as everyone else. That's such an important point I can't believe they are still ignoring it.
Next, they really need to open up the system. iOS would have had wireless sync 2 years ago if APIs were more open and there weren't any AppStore restrictions. The walled garden is supposed to for the benefit of the users, but - to be really honest - that kind of ideology has been proven, time and time again, to not work very well.
So I'm kind of disappointed in Apple they didn't take the opportunity, they had, to truly own the mobile market, and instead let it slip, because of what, stubbornness?
Apple was once the platform for innovation, but only Android offers that freedom now.
If you don't use an Android device as your primary device, how do you know it well enough to develop for it? How do you use your own app?
http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/emulator...
On Android you need to deal with a greater variety of screen resolutions and other features. Thus, even if you have a device, testing on it alone is not sufficient.
I really want to use my music app, but it's still really new and doesn't yet have autosync to keep my content up to date. Once we get that, who knows?
Even though I like the iPhone and the apps available on iTunes, I think high-end Android phones are just better. For example I made the switch basically because on Android I can block unwanted calls and even make it do various tricks related to that and even if the API itself is not public, there are apps in Android's marketplace that do this (though eventually I ended up cooking up my own app, for fun). To do the same on iPhone, you have to root it and use Cydia.
This is one example of freedom the Android gives you that is immediately useful to some end-users that couldn't live without blocking some calls or SMS messages.
Just thought I'd mention that iOS 5 has fixed this. iTunes sync no longer locks the phone. Also, iCloud and OTA updates mean you'll probably never have to connect to iTunes again if you don't want to.
In other words, it seems like even if MSFT, Nokia, RIM and Google have virtually infinite money they can't catch up. That's a real competitive advantage for Apple.
Apple is really hitting their stride, after almost 30 years, and the state of the market is perfect for a company just like them. With how closed they are, though, I don't think they'll dominate. That seems to be fine with Apple, though - they're not after the next Windows.
I think the momentum behind Android, and the wide variety of companies using it, is going to keep it at the #1 mobile OS spot. The future of the ones other than Android and iOS doesn't look great for phones. Tablet are still so new, that it's difficult to predict what will happen.
I think what we are seeing is that Apple's ability to develop hardware and software in lock-step gives them the ability to release earlier than anybody else.
Think about something like Windows 8. Microsoft develops it, shows it to manufacturers as it gets closer and closer to being completed, gets feedback and makes adjustments while manufacturers start designing for the new platform, then they finally get a 'release candidate' and finish of the hardware. Then who is responsible for marketing?
Of course, RIM is also an end-to-end provider, but they haven't had the vision to lead.
Lets not forget that all the manufacturers were showing tablets before Apple launched the iPad, but it took another year for non-Apple tablets to hit the market en-masse.
This has never been the case in mobile development before. Although ObjC was a stranger to most people back then, it's certainly something you can learn and work with.
Next comes Google, again massive APIs, everything perfectly documented, tools that work. On top of that, the language of choice is Java and the former best platform for developer, Blackberrys, just looks severely outdated in comparison to Android.
RIM's root APIs basically didn't change since the age of monochrome-displayed Blackberrys. Over time they patched in support for colored displays, then 2-way navigation wheel, then 4-way navigation ball, and later on touchscreens. The reason the BlackBerry Storm has an extra 'click' in the screen (you could tap the screen to highlight something e.g. a button and then press the whole screen down, like a mouse button, to actually click the button), is that the whole User Interface APIs relied on onFocus and onClick events, something that comes from the times of the 2-way navigation wheel and is fundamentally incompatible with the way touch devices work.
Now in retrospect its easy to say they should have rewritten everything a couple years ago and started with a new OS from scratch, but that's a big risk to take and generally not how big companies work.
Anyway the new generation of modern smartphone OS'es is now in full swing and RIM OS is pretty much dead. Microsoft knows that, they started from scratch, Nokia knows that, they gave up on Symbian. RIM? They probably can hold on to business customers for some years, but recovery is gonna be hard.
I wanna believe.
It's complex - because a lot of factors come into play. iPhone has better battery life (as long as you don't touch the GPS), Android has more freedom, WP7 has a nice engaging interface, RIM is unbeatable in messaging, etc...
But, it would be nice to see what people think of their smart phones a year after purchase, and add _that_ into the unweighted graph [1] of Profit/Market Share/Revenue Share that Asymco does.
I guess, to some degree, that's represented in a "Will you buy the same model during the next refresh" - and the answer to that question might be a good proxy for "How happy are you, one year later, with the value you receive from your smart phone"
That, too me, will be a key indicator of which of the mobile providers will prevail.
[1] http://www.asymco.com/2011/05/26/a-new-mobile-phone-market-i...
Try to be a bit more collegial on here.
To the OP--I'm sorry if I came off as impolite, I truly was aiming for conciseness, not malice.
2. RIM needs to stop being shy about where they manufacture their products. They need to bring manufacturing completely (as in 100%) in to North America and advertise the heck out of that. Apple relies on inexpensive, cheap labor - hit them in the marketing cahones.
3. RIM needs to build a profitable developer marketplace. The only reason anyone cares about iOS Apps is because there is a chance small developers can make a lot of money developing. RIM needs to create a system where developers can easily earn money. From in-app purchases, to a robust in-app ad serving platform to flexible purchasing options, RIM needs to take a giant step back and let a developer develop any app they want and charge any way they want.
4. RIM needs to remember that it is first and foremost, a hardware company. They've never been good at making pretty software that works well. Palm, Handspring, HP, Microsoft, and Apple have all at one time or another beat RIM time and again with software - but rarely hardware. Mobile Internet Devices don't need to be complicated or even revolutionary - they just need to be sturdy, refined and fashionable. Forget about saving money on Curve keyboards, forget about trying to breakthrough some crappy "clicking screen", build really great hardware, even if that hardware doesn't conform to the latest trends.
5. Last, RIM needs to kick cellular providers in the butt. They need to step up where Apple hasn't and make their consumer level data plans inexpensive, open and user friendly.
1) Very true. Apple is anal about the smallest details, RIM isn't. RIM has too many products in parallel development to dedicate the kind of resources they would need to match Apple. Just can't happen. Just accept it and come with your own style. 2) I absolutely love this. RIM does have a lot of manufacturing done overseas, but they have a very modern manufacturing facility right in Waterloo. Bring it all here and hype that up. It might flop, but it's a ballsy move that people would appreciate. 3) I am not sure if this is the case anymore, but for a while there, BlackBerry's were being shipped without App World on them. Wtf! 4) I disagree here. Their acquisition of QNX was brilliant. Use the playbook and you realize that it's an entirely different operating system than OS6. I think it could be very successful on their phones. 5) Interesting. Would help to become the low-cost smartphone while keeping margins relatively high.
In my opinion, it all comes down to how well QNX can create a compelling smartphone operating system. Do it well, and RIM will do just fine capitalizing on their legacy customers and getting those who want a keyboard. Screw it up, we might be looking at the next Palm.
"3) I am not sure if [Blackberry apps are a problem] anymore."
Yup - they are. I think the solution is in the money developers can earn. Quote from Gizmodo: "BlackBerry App World debuted in 2009 and had about 26,000 applications as of April 2011. Android had over 200,000 apps and iOS was pushing 350,000."
"In my opinion, it all comes down to how well QNX can create a compelling smartphone operating system."
With the current outlook and direction of RIM in mind, I completely agree with you. However, Apple's mobile devices are founded on cheap, disposable hardware. It's a sound strategy. RIM however previously found a great deal of success by founding their products on the hardware along with a secure, reliable OS. The times have certainly changed, but I think that the fundamental problem with RIM is that they have lost sight of this.
5. So much of this, but I doubt they have enough power to do this anymore. Case in point: BESX (the free enterprise server). When BESX came out everyone was happy until Verizon were assholes and still required some nonsense fees that BESX was supposed to make free.
I don't know how much things have changed since then -- it's been about a year now -- but I doubt its any different now.
Not to mention that the US isn't the only market for smartphones out there, so a large portion of the market certainly don't care if something is manufactured in the US.
Making quality software is probably the biggest opportunity for RIM right now, not the location of manufacture.
RIM is still in a position to take the high road. Their devices don't need to compete on price. They can compete on quality. With manufacturing brought completely in to North America, RIM could say things like "take pride in our products - we do" and "Apple is in it for the money, we're in it to make our lives better".
pride when you make inferior product is not a good idea. Imagine the reaction of the people if just after I lose on first round of a Tennis open(I did) I scream to the stands: I'm so proud of me!!!
"Apple is in it for the money, we're in it to make our lives better"
If they say that they will be lying. Actually Apple has so much money in the bank that they could take the luxury of not being on it for the money, while RIM needs it to survive. Does Steve Jobs is there for the money? I bet you not.
1. Agree to a degree they already doing it on Playbook by taking good stuff from WebOS whenever I use iPad I wish I had PB ui on it. 2.It would take a very good marketer to pull this off and make real money. Not sure about it. 3. You can make money on AppWorld and competition is not like on iOS. They have payment and ad api. They also now introducing BBM sdk, which could be a massive money maker for some apps that can integrate with it. 4. I do not think they can do this, huge part of their brand is software (security BBM etc) QNX is what will either save them or kill them I think. 5. Not sure, my plan costs me $35 cdn and its unlimited sms, 5gb of data etc (go WIND!)
QNX is the key, I just hope we do not have to code in flash to make stuff for it.
This si an exciting time to be a dev in mobile I think both RIM and MS can really surprise many people who think this is all over. US is farm from the only market, people here tend to forget that.
I don't think that RIM should ignore their OS or the software that runs on it - far from it. I think that RIM needs to make a course correction and that the course correction should focus on hardware. Software is will easily make or break RIM (as you've noted with QNX), but centering their products on a strong, reliable, thin and easily extendable OS should become front-and-center.
"5. Not sure, my plan costs me $35 cdn and its unlimited sms, 5gb of data etc (go WIND!)"
Sadly, Wind is only available in heavily populated metropolitan areas and RIM has done nothing to ensure low rates. Wind is simply competing on price.
RIM needs to publicly open discussions with every carrier in the world. They need to form collations to reduce cellular data fees so that their devices proliferate even faster. How much more popular would the Playbook be if it came with an unlimited data plan that cost $5 a month? How many more Blackberries would we see (regardless of product changes) if they openly supported the customers who used their devices?
Beyond offsetting hardware costs with term fees, monthly data costs are outrageous. Battling them is a way to win favor with the public and secure a larger number of users.
Did you miss where Apple negotiated the dump pipe iPad plan?
2. So people that is not North American, like Europeans, Japanese, Chinese and South Americans have more reasons to not choose it. Do you honestly think that you(Americans) are the center of the world?
3.4.Yes, they have to.
5. They can't kick their customers!! Remember that RIM does not have a direct sales channel as Apple has, they need cellular providers. It is terrible expensive to have it(you need billions of dollars in inventory).
When RIM made emailing from the road a very simple process, and created an enterprise-class system for businesses, their brand hit its peak. When they tried to leverage themselves into the consumer market, they did have some initial success. But when they were starting to actually jump into the pond--after dipping their toes in--Apple came in and sucker punched the entire market in January 2007.
All of a sudden, big players like RIM were behind the curve, figuratively and, for RIM, literally.
They essentially had a 6-month period to get phones that could compete with Apple and nobody really did a good job. The first iPhone was very vulnerable--no native apps, EDGE, and big price tag--but by the time anyone could offer an iPhone-like experience, Apple had the 3G, native apps, and a lower price tag.
RIM seemed to simply take too long to close their gaps. Their first touchscreen had a hugely misplaced marketing campaign. When RIM released the Storm, they made their SureTouch (or whatever it's called) screen a huge focus. Differentiation is certainly a product strategy, but it seemed like a fairly ridiculous thing to try to base your marketing around. At the time, a lot of people were weary of touchscreens vs. physical keyboards, but the added "value" of the SureTouch didn't come close to a physical keyboard and hindered the use of the touchscreen.
It seems like RIM's major problems were with product design / development, coupled with bad marketing. They controlled the business market, which helped drive the consumer market, and then lost control of it.
Nokia has a similar problem, I think. When people imagine Nokia they imagine a 1990s era dumb phone, or at best a crippled feature phone. It doesn't matter what else Nokia does, they are defined that way in the consumer mind.
When people think of Android they think of Google, super smart things like mapping, searching, voice recognition, translation, calendaring, etc. They feel like they are on the edge, living in the future.
And when they think of the iPhone they think of the slick, super smooth experience, the games and multimedia features, apps.
It doesn't really matter what any of these companies do, they'll continue to be defined this way and only Android & iPhone have a truly positive image in this new world. WP7 is hard to define and I'm divided on whether Nokia is good or bad because when Nokia becomes an influence on the brand it may well act like a boat anchor rather than the winch MS obviously wants it to be.
This really could have, and should have, been done a while ago, but it's seems like Mike Lazardis is on some kind of a ego trip.
I had a Blackberry 8830 a few years ago and, even at that time, I thought it was a barebones POS. The email client was pretty unremarkable, as I recall.
No, he's just doing what any good CEO of a large enterprise should do - increase shareholder value. They've pushed strong numbers from 2007 and have only recently started to plummet. (for now obvious reasons) Innovator's dilemma at its finest.
The decision to ship it without email or calendaring, though... I don't know what they were thinking.
Cost Optimization Program: The company also announced that it will begin a program to streamline operations across the organization, which will include a headcount reduction. This realignment will be focused on taking out redundancies and a reallocation of resources to allow us to focus on the areas that offer the highest growth opportunities and align with RIM strategic objectives, such as accelerating new product introductions.
(Source - Research in Motion's first quarter results for fiscal 2012 - page 2 - retrieved from http://press.rim.com/financial/release.jsp?id=5051)
I wish that companies would ditch the PR speech when they announce layoffs.
I'm only saying this because I'm still bitter from my last employment where this kind of business talk was routinely used to fill the void where management's vision was supposed to be. It really begins to grate.
"RIM's real problems center around two big issues: its market is saturating, and it seems to have lost the ability to create great products. This is a classic problem that eventually faces most successful computer platforms. The danger is not that RIM is about to collapse, but that it'll drift into in a situation where it can't afford the investments needed to succeed in the future. It's very easy for a company to accidentally cross that line, and very hard to get back across it."
I disagree with this part. RIM's products are just as good/bad as they've always been - the problem is that Apple came in and raised the bar across the board, and Google came in and did it some more.
RIM is creating early-2000s product in a landscape that has been completely reshaped by iOS and Android.
I imagine that they are basing their future growth around other products based on this new stack. They are behind, but they may still catch up enough to do well. After all, if Apple has proven anything it's that execution matters a whole lot. More so even than features.
Android is a good competitor to iOS only because they have both the features and execution down well enough. Apple may still have an edge in polish, but it's diminishing.
What RIM didn't realize is that this was happening because of their global inertia, not because their products are still very competitive with iPhones and high-end Android phones. After all, there are still a lot of people who keep buying high-end Nokia phones rather than iPhones or Android phones.
It's all about inertia. They experience growth in new markets (for now - just a matter of time) but their core markets are fading away. This could blind them for years from seeing that they will be in trouble eventually, because overall they were still making a lot of money until more recently.
Most technology companies of any kind actually.
Alternatively, if you believed in the iPhone, why not just invest in Apple? Their stock has risen 300% over that same period.
The iPad, though, was a different story. I knew I wanted a giant iPod Touch as soon as the iPhone came out, but when the iPad was finally announced I wasn't sure if they were going to sell 2,000 of them or 20,000,000. To this day I think my uncertainty was defensible, because unlike phones there was no existing mass market.
I think it was pretty obvious that the iPhone was going to
be a huge success.
Jobs' boast about being three years ahead of everyone else sounded like empty hype, and Ballmer's public assertion that the iPhone would never gain significant market share sounded like strategic misdirection.
I'm not going to post any trade confirmations, but I did buy some AAPL in response to the iPhone announcement, thinking it was a good way for the company to leverage its existing strengths in UX design. Should've bought more, but hey, it was AAPL, and the conventional wisdom at the time went something like, "What kind of moron would put a lot of money into AAPL?"
I don't lay claim to any magical insight, and that's the whole point of my post.
http://gigaom.com/2010/01/26/alan-kay-with-the-tablet-apple-...
If you shorted a stock at $50, covered your margins up to $100, and waited another three years to close out your position at $35, either you have testicular elephantiasis, or a goddamn crystal ball.
I'd expect the layoffs to be around 5% maybe at most 10%, but really things can still turn around for RIM if they can get their new OS out in mass, so I think we are still not quite in a complete panic.
Blackberry has a 42% share of the smartphone market in Canada. [3] They also dominate other markets like Argentina. [4]
I wouldn't count them out just yet. I don't see the Playbook getting much of a response from users who don't already use BBs, but their handsets will have a long life. They will have to move fast to keep up with Android, but I think this announcement is a good example that they are aware.
[1] http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/201105/6765/BlackBe...
[2] http://m.mobilemarketingmagazine.com/mobilemarketing/i/artic...
[3] http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/6/c...
[4] http://www.nextwirelesslatam.com/index.php/1-3g/symbian-and-...
[1]http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/02/rim-announces-blackberry-...
[2]http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/27/rim-introduces-playbook-t...
[3]http://www.intomobile.com/2011/01/10/blackberry-playbook-tab...