by Jean-Louis Gassée
Once upon a time, the Blackberry was the king of smartphones. After a succession of Psion PDAs and Palm devices, I loved my Blackberry, it was the perfect PIM (Personal Information Manager). Email, contacts and calendar functions worked well together — and Exchange integration was the killer Enterprise feature. It even made phone calls! On Verizon, that is.
Year after year, RIM kept improving its product and expanding its worldwide distribution. The Blackberry became de rigueur, addictive, justifiably earning its Crackberry nickname.
Shareholders weren’t disappointed either. Between February 1999 and June 2008, RIM stock gained $143/share, a rise of 7,793%:
But, on the same chart, we see RIM lost 11.23% of its value in one session, this past Friday March 25th.
Why?
As often, the answer is a combination: underlying trends + a trigger event.
The trigger event was RIM’s release of its latest quarterly numbers. On the surface, the results looked reasonable. 14.9 million units shipped versus 14.2 million in the spring, $5.5B in revenue and $934 million in net income, up 32%.
The bad news start with unit growth, it is out of sync with the rest of the industry where percentages are more in the 50% to 100% range. For reference, Apple’s iPhone unit sales grew by 93% from 2009 to 2010. More recent Android devices grew even faster.
Then, RIM’s guidance (Wall Street argot for forecasting games) for the following quarter is weak: revenue flat or dropping, between $5.2 and $5.6B. Rote explanations follow, from lower average prices, lower gross margins, to investment in the development and launch of new products, and supply-chain disruption stemming from the March 11th earthquake in Northeastern Japan.
Not a word of competition from Android-based handsets or iPhones.
Which gets us to the underlying trend: we now live in an App world.
RIM reigned at a time when your Blackberry came with everything you needed. Suitably placated, the IT gent configured your Exchange connection and off you went. I was one such user when I bought my first iPhone and kept carrying both devices. Remember 2007: Dear Leader telling us we didn’t need native apps, Web 2.0 software was perfectly adequate. But even then, browsing the Web on an iPhone was such a superior experience to what the Blackberry provided.
Then, in 2008, the App Store opened; iPhone Exchange integration became useable and I let go of my Blackberry.
Coincidentally, when you look at the stock chart comparing Apple, Google and RIM, 2008 is also the year when, after reaching its all-time peak, RIM started its descent:
If you look at the worlds of Android and iOS apps, RIM’s achievements look modest by comparison. By November 2010, the Blackberry App World offered about 15,000 apps. This isn’t much compared to the hundreds of thousands claimed by Android and iOS.
I won’t get into details such as which apps work on which Blackberries, how to pay for and how to install those. Suffice it to say, even if you put the number of apps aside, on the sole ease of use criterion, the Blackberry App World isn’t competitive.
Blackberry smartphones were great products, RIM’s management has achieved strong carrier distribution around the world. But competitors now have better devices and better app stores.
As this loss of competitive edge became more apparent, RIM’s management had to explain their plans to increasingly skeptical Wall Street analysts and media.
Things didn’t go well.
In RIM’s case, management consists of two CEOs and three COOs. I checked here, it’s true. Lately, neither CEO hasn’t made much sense when describing RIM’s future.
Interviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek in September 2010, Jim Balsillie says this:
“There’s tremendous turbulence in the ecosystem, of course, in mobility. And that’s sort of an obvious thing, but also there’s tremendous architectural contention at play. And so I’m going to really frame our mobile architectural distinction. We’ve taken two fundamentally different approaches in their causalness. It’s a causal difference, not just nuance. It’s not just a causal direction that I’m going to really articulate here—and feel free to go as deep as you want—it’s really as fundamental as causalness.”
The other CEO, Mike Lazaridis, isn’t doing much better. Last December, he was on stage at the D-Dive Into Mobile conference, interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. See the video here, and an Endgadget liveblog here. The liveblog should be read from the bottom, as the format dictates: successive entries are pushed at the top. But you can read in any direction, it won’t matter as Lazaridis sounds quite free with logic.
Yes, there’s always the danger of quoting someone out of context, or of catching an individual at a bad time. I know these two executives have built RIM into a worldwide industry leader, they deserve respect for such an achievement. Look at RIM’s history, getting there wan’t easy — or spotless.
Still, last week, RIM’s other co-CEO kept going. See the earnings call transcript, edited by Business Insider, where Balsillie keeps speaking in tongues:
I’m just not interested in these sort of religious application tonnage issues. I really think we put that issue to bed. And if you think the whole world’s going to want to develop for Gingerbread, fine. Do I think that’s going to happen? Then why is there a different environment for a tablet? And you know about the performance issues and you know about the app volume issues, cause it’s tough. And that’s why QNX matters.
That’s why people are saying, Is this stuff going to go more in the browser and HTML 5 and more native? These are going to be strong trends. But if you want these app players for different VMs — and don’t forget we have 25,000 BlackBerry 6 apps. So, at the end of the day, we believe this is going to be about performance. It’s going to be about enterprise greatness. Things like multi-threaded capability, symmetric multiprocessing. We believe it’s about an uncompromised web. We believe it’s about enterprise security. True multitasking, not with suspension — and that matters because you’re going to want to run these things in the background.
But I’m out of the religious war on tonnage, which I’m delighted.
… (Lots of repetition.)
I think it’s very important to understand that this idea of “no compromise” matters. And this idea that you can pick whichever one you want.
RIM is scrambling to gate a tablet to market “before it’s too late’’.
First, for its tablet, the PlayBook, the company needs an OS. Luckily, RIM lives close to one of the great Canadian universities with strong Computer Science and Mathematics programs: the University of Waterloo. QNX was invented there, a very good operating system for embedded applications. Last year, RIM buys QNX from Harman Industries.
Next, hardware. Multi-core ARM SOCs are aplenty and Asian suppliers are at the ready to build hardware to your specs.
Now, we need apps. And for apps we need a development system, specifically one running on QNX.
This is where the madness really starts: the Native SDK, meaning the programming tools required to write high-performance QNX apps in C or C++, isn’t ready for the coming April 19th launch. According to Mobile Beat, “The company has a limited version of its BlackBerry Tablet OS Native Development Kit that will be in open beta by this summer.”
As an interim measure, RIM offers a number of other solutions, called ‘‘app players’’. These are emulators or, if you will, a kind of virtual machine. The app players run existing applications, and new ones can be developed using the tools from the emulated platforms.
So, you have app players for games, for HTML5 apps, Adobe Air and for Blackberry Java used on the company’s smartphones. This is complicated and not developer-friendly, leading Jamie Murai, an experienced app developer, to write RIM a strongly worded open letter. To the company’s credit, the head of Developer Relations, Tyler Lessard, responded quickly and honestly. But Lessard couldn’t really solve the basic problem: as Murai explained in great and vivid detail, developing for the PlayBook can’t compare favorably to the competition, to Android or iOS.
But wait, there’s more.
You’ve noted the curious “application tonnage” phrase in Balsillie’s utterance above. Justifiably, RIM is worried about getting enough applications on the PlayBook. No apps, no sale, as Robert Scoble succinctly explains.
Where do we turn to?
Apple is out of question, but Android is open. Let’s go Android and make their 200,000 apps run on the PlayBook. Problem solved, we have “tonnage”.
This is serious madness, in two ways.
If Android apps do run on the PlayBook, why bother writing for QNX? The PlayBook becomes an Android tablet and QNX no longer matters, right?
In response, Balsillie treats us to more contorted language:
And if you think the whole world’s going to want to develop for Gingerbread [a version of Android], fine. Do I think that’s going to happen? Then why is there a different environment for a tablet? And you know about the performance issues and you know about the app volume issues, cause it’s tough. And that’s why QNX matters.
Android apps will run slowly, [so far inexistent] QNX native apps will be faster.
Why?
Because the Android apps are running inside another app player, another emulator. As a result, performance will suffer. This could be a useful stopgap measure: you buy a PlayBook and go to the Android Market for your app needs. Killer QNX apps will arrive later — assuming developers are committing to the ecosystem.
But, no.
We now move to the second part of the madness: the “going to the Android Market” part is false. It is a deliberate attempt to mislead.
The Android apps won’t work directly into the app player. The developer, not the user, will need to “quickly and easily” port their apps to run on the tablet OS, according to RIM. The same developer will also need to repackage, code sign and submit their apps to the Blackberry App World for approval.
There is more: the PlayBook app player will only run Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) apps. These apps are designed for smartphones, not tablets. According to Google, for tablets you need Android 3.0 (Honeycomb).
RIM succeeded because word of mouth, not advertising, sold the Blackberry. Proud users begat more proud users. What will happen when users “share” the true value of the “running Android apps” claim?
No one could fault RIM for the “iPad surprise”. After decades of misbegotten tablets, no one was prepared for the rise of the new genre.
Reacting quickly, not wanting Apple to gain too much of a market stronghold makes business sense. But launching what is clearly an immature product and trying to compensate for a dearth of applications with a misleading claim of compatibility with the wrong version of Android is insane.
Those whom the gods would destroy, they first render mad…
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48 Comments
This post does a great job of covering many points — and in the title, its tone — of RIM’s recent actions. Still, there are some points that deserve calling out as oddities that I’d love to hear answers on.
If RIM understands the Enterprise so well, why have they waited almost until introduction to even say publicly what their developer roadmap is? As of yesterday (Saturday), neither the Green Box Android, the OS5 java compatibility box nor a native toolkit were mentioned on the BlackBerry Tablet OS developers’ page.
With the emphasis on “tonnage,” Jim B obviously shows utter disdain still for the notion of a robust app ecosystem except as a marketing issue. Does he know something about his market that has escaped the rest of us?
Also derived from the two points above, RIM is trusting its reputation to the perception that they are out of control on the app front. This product will earn “I can’t find any way to recommend the Playbook even when these stopgap compatibility boxes are released” type reviews in a couple of weeks; who in their right mind trashes their brand name by pretending that junk is worthy of their heritage?
I imagine Mr. Balsillie was quite correct in saying that especially graphics would be awful in the Green Box. Apple must be thrilled at the way this will trash perceptions of the Android ecosystem, especially since they have already stolen the crown on graphics support for games on tablets.
RIM has reportedly certified a couple thousand apps already for the Playbook that use the AIR and HTML interpreters. These will offer suitable game performance where Android will not. Android will be more appropriate for more involved apps, such as perhaps the expense-tracking system I use on my desktops and iPhone. These involved apps, however, need first-class integration with the rest of the system (camera, communications, copy/paste from the browser, etc) and this looks like a non-trivial compatibility challenge. Net-net, many developers of serious, Enterprise apps will probably play wait-and-see before committing on the very core market that RIM thinks it wants to serve. Why has RIM acted so erratically, and given so little guidance to developers? Does RIM think all it needs to offer is a capable browser plus a screen extender for its phones, plus some other junk?
“There is more: the PlayBook app player will only run Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) apps. These apps are designed for smartphones, not tablets. According to Google, for tablets you need Android 3.0 (Honeycomb).”
Just FYI, Gingerbread or Froyo apps are potentially full tablet apps.
Google has backported the essential Fragments API UI extensions for Honeycomb to be compatible with Android 1.6 and later.
Given the size of the installed base of Android smartphone handsets vs Android 3.0 tablets, Android 2.2 will probably be the predominant deployment target for most Android tablet apps for some time.
Also considering that Playbook apparently will require developers to rebuild their Android apps anyway this is a non-issue in that context.
As for the prospect of creating Android apps for Playbook, why would an Android developer want to be part of RIM’s “tonnage” quota?
Great commentary as usual!
One thought, however, on the bits about Android apps running slower by comparison. That may be true, but I’m not sure we can assume that just yet. Android apps even on *Android* devices run in a VM. Google has boosted app performance simply by tweaking the Dalvik VM, so depending how RIM’s app player is devised, Andrpid apps could actually run quite well, in terms of performance, especially with the hardware in the PlayBook. We’ll know for sure in a few weeks, of course.
I’m sure having plenty of apps is important for a new tablet. But the key to a device like the PlayBook would be to have a handful of exclusive killer apps that aren’t available elsewhere.
RIM should have focused on this. The company’s pedigree with the business market means it should have lined up essential business-oriented apps so that corporations would buy the tablets – just as they brought the phones – and hand them out to executives.
Allowing users to download Angry Birds is not going to win corporate business.
And for RIm, the name PLAYbook is part of the problem. Sticking with the button-down collar approach would have made more sense.
@KCT, Froyo 2.2 included some wonderful engineering that puts java apps at much less of a disadvantage when running repetitive code — such as writing graphics to a screen. This technology, JIT compilation, was a key factor in speedups of javascript when Apple included it in its latest release of Safari.
But normally this VM gets direct access to the hardware. In a compatibility box, each instruction that normally sets graphics memory to the correct color/brightness level, now has to go thru yet another intermediary level of software that checks to see that the Android VM — which I like to call the Green Box after similarly-named compatibility modes during Apple’s wrenching late-90s transition — actually is in charge of that memory area, or a non-Android app has stepped in front.
This was woefully articulated, like the rest of the comments, but Balsillie was clearly trying to say that Android graphics would be awful. I can imagine that no effort would be made to run Flash in that mode, for example. Or, perhaps, the Android browser with Flash embedded in it is not part of the Gingerbread open source anyway. This incoherent announcement, followed up by zero fact sheets or other marketing announcements, leaves a long list of questions, including Google’s participation and licensing terms, unanswered.
@Walt French Where do you get this business about a “Green Box”?
Android already runs inside a VM. It’s called Dalvik. On normal Android handsets Dalvik runs on top of Linux. On the Playbook it would seem they’re putting Dalvik on top of QNX. Why would pixels have to go through a translation layer? That’s nonsense. They aren’t building an emulation layer to contain wayward MacOS 9 applications.
Also Flash is not embedded in the Android 2.3 browser.
Are you sure the Android-box will use Dalvik? If the apps need to be repackaged they could be compiled as full standard Java-code – RIM already has a license with Sun/Oracle for Java so why risk being sued by Oracle.
If Android developers needs to pay RIM to re-publish the applications on AppWorld as stated in the Jamie Murai’s open letter, the PlayBook is pretty much dead on arrival.
I think a lot of developers won’t bother to re-publish their apps. Microsoft had a compatibility layer for CP/M, the dominant desktop OS at the time, where it made famous application written for CP/M like WordStar being compatible with DOS with a minimum effort.
But Microsoft didn’t charge for it. It was the developer’s best interest to take advantage of this compatibility layer
that’s the problem though RichardL pundits are only seeing the current carrot and forget about QNX RTP6 as per 2000 when ‘Dan dodge’ first released RTP6.0 what rim now distribute is in effect RTP 6.4 or so
they dont bother to goggle its original capability’s or even know how Photon UI block layers and all the innovative LAN Tcp/IP stuff works etc in this Real Time Platform micro kernel and support system.
goggle is your friend use it.
when you say “Balsillie keeps speaking in tongues:” you just dont get it apparently and so miss the real money pot, he’s not speaking in tongues, you just dont speak the same language as the real devs that know RTP and its full potential for fast investment money return’s
but you will soon understand when it finally hits home, this is not your old RIM OS this is far in advance of anything you’ve seen yet in the hands of a talented 3rd party consumer dev team, and its already on board the deep space sat’s so you know its reliable , the rest is up to you as the devs making profits for the investors long term, innovate to the future, dont emulate 2 cycle apple and its like….
Emerson, and QNX is fully POSIX compliment and C99 too OC,infact they were one of a very few at the time of QNX2/4 etc were fully certified back in the day, far more so than Linux has been
in fact referencing the old CP/M especially the MS version that was shall we say less than complete to be kind doesn’t enter in to it ether then or now C99 and POSIX for OOS code does however especially today
Great post Jean-Louis. Thanks for the mention. What interests me is that RIM plans to support four different SDK’s in the near future. WebWorks, Air, Java, and C/C++. I think the WebWorks, and a single native SDK would do just fine, and allow them to allocate the necessary engineering resources to produce something on par with the competition. I got a kick out a re-tweet from one of RIM’s social media guys the other day. It said “Quality over Quantity”. Isn’t that basically the exact opposite of RIM’s current strategy for the Playbook? Their own CEO seemed to imply that they were, grudgingly, using the Android app player as a means to claim a large number of apps that aren’t even written for the tablet form factor.
The Rim QNX App player sounds a lot like the old UCSD P-system. #fail
The sad thing is, we’ve seen RIM’s 2011 BlackBerry roadmap leak. There’s good (or at least competent) phones coming. But the co-CEOs (especially Balsillie) are so trapped in corporate language and making pitches to carriers, enterprise buyers, anyone but real people that you would swear from public events that they were the ones who tried to build the Tower of Babel.
On the other hand, it makes for very amusing fiscal results Q&A sessions. Balsillie invariably sounds like a 1960s hippie who’d learned everything he knew about English from accountants.
JLG, you sharpened your blade this week!
Given that RIM has two CEOs, three COOs and no analyst nor customer can understand what the CEOs are saying — whether in English or French — just imagine in how many directions the staff are being pulled.
Apps are bad! We must adopt Android! iPhone is a toy! We must rush QNX! Protect our margins! Lower our price point!
I think they are suffering from an overabundance of “reacting quickly.”
I’ve never been a huge fan of RIM, but I have a few issues of what was argued in this article.
First of all, it sounds to me that the Android app “player” is just the Android virtual machine running on QNX and it probably isn’t an emulator. After all, the Android OS is essentially Linux where Android apps are run on a virtual machine too, but on top of Linux, so RIM could be doing the same thing as Google (but replacing Linux with QNX). If so, apps will run just as well and perhaps even better on a PlayBook if QNX is more efficient than Linux.
And I realize that supporting multiple SDKs does not send a clear message to developers. But you know what other OS supports multiple SDKs? Microsoft Windows. And it seems to be doing well in the market. Windows can run apps coded against Win32, WPF, Java, AIR, Qt, etc. using C/C++, C#, VB, Java, Actionscript, JavaScript/HTML and countless others. Apart from look and feel inconsistency, why is it so bad that a tablet supports different technologies to create apps?
Even the RIM sycophants (TechU) are speaking in tongues. Maybe they truly do have a shared language separate from English?
Jean Louis, are you short RIM? (no sarcasm here, just a real question). Based on your write up, I would be.
It appears that RIM executives are “rushing” out with a tablet now because a year ago they were being upbraided by shareholders for not having an answer to the iPad 1 hysteria. But they are in good company that way. At least the Playbook comes in a smaller form to distinguish itself somewhat. I just hope they continue producing handheld phones with physical keyboards for young fogeys like me.
Good stuff.
As regards the platform strategy, it is funny to think that Apple did to RIM what Microsoft did to her back in the 80′s.
You would overthink a plate of beans.
The strategy of RIM should be to whore themselves to carriers harder than google or apple. In the US market, users don’t pick their cell phones, carriers do.
> One thought, however, on the bits about Android apps
> running slower by comparison. That may be true, but
> I’m not sure we can assume that just yet. Android apps
> even on *Android* devices run in a VM.
Yes, which is why they run so badly on Android as well. I think the comparison here is between VM apps and native apps, vis a vis RIM’s announcement that they will have Android apps at launch, but their native C/C++ SDK doesn’t ship until later.
Right now, iOS has a native C/C++/Objective-C advantage all to itself. Apple’s mobiles are the only mobiles that are open to C developers. Every other mobile walls its C development off just for the device maker. Native development enables Apple to have lower RAM (cheaper devices), longer battery life, and a much broader range of much more powerful apps. Especially in games, which are all written in C++. That is an outrageous advantage over other mobile platforms.
I would have liked to have seen RIM focus on making PlayBook the best HTML5 platform they can make and the best native C/C++ platform they can make. Make the HTML5 platform as iOS-like as possible (they are already using Apple WebKit as their browser engine) so that iPhone/iPad Web apps just work. And make it as easy as possible to port an iOS native C/C++/Objective-C app to PlayBook.
Right now, iOS developers have nowhere to port to. RIM is saying “Android developers, port to PlayBook” even though Android apps are VM apps. They should be saying “iOS developers, port to PlayBook”. They should be betting the whole PlayBook on that. Right now, iOS developers are spoiled by 3 things: native C, a limited range of highly compatible devices for deployment and testing, and a great end-to-end developer program with built-in remuneration. Nobody else has been willing to provide even 1 of those 3 things to iOS developers. RIM is uniquely positioned to provide all 3, if that had been their priority.
But like Steve Jobs said, RIM doesn’t know what they are doing as far as being a computer maker and offering a software platform. They are building a device independent of thinking of it as a development platform and hoping developers will sort it all out. With Apple, as much as the iOS SDK shipped a year after the first device, the SDK actually preceded the device. Developers inside Apple used that SDK to make the built-in iPhone apps that shipped with the first device. iOS was built as an app platform, which is why 3rd party developers lost their minds when they saw it and wanted to develop for it. It’s a phone where the T9 keypad has been replaced with app icons!
I think the next important event in PlayBook’s life will be when the native SDK ships. If it is awesome, PlayBook may be around in 5 years. If the native SDK sucks, put a fork in it.
@youssef
What does Microsoft saving Apple from bankruptcy have to do with RIM?Did Apple give RIM money recently or something? What did I miss?
@Michael McGhee wrote, “The Rim QNX App player sounds a lot like the old UCSD P-system. #fail”
While the UCSD P-system was a quick ‘n dirty solution on many 8-bit computers, there was one machine, the Western Digital Pascal MicroEngine, which was designed to run it. By putting the P-codes into microcode (a common hardware approach then and now), it meant the computer’s native language became the P-codes that were merely interpreted (slowly) on other machines.
This made for dramatic speedups. Although it predated the IBM PC by a couple of years, my P-machine ran general programs about 5X the speed of equivalent, well-compiled programs on the subsequent IBM’s 8088 CPU. Now 30 years later, the design tools to include specialized hardware make hardware assistance much, much easier, although I have not understood that RIM is attempting anything of the sort.
While we have not yet seen how RIM will implement their equivalent of the Android JVM, per RIM, graphics in their Android box might be very slow. There might be many reasons, but RIM would be happy to crow about its features, if it had justification to do so, which is apparently does not. I’ll take their comments at face value: graphics for Android apps will be very slow.
RIM sales are already overinflated – they seem to continually run a “buy one, get one for your SO” deal.
My wife is a phone junkie. She’s had every iphone (except 4), she currently uses a 3GS, after spending the last year on a HTC Wildfire. She also has a 3G RAZR and a white plastic Sony Ericsson thing. The only phones she did not keep were the Blackberry and the HTC Diamond (WinCE/WinMob)
RIM have managed to squander their advantage in a number of ways, including but not limited to allowing the carriers to impose complex plans for the difference between “blackberry data” and “Internet data” as we found out when presented with a £300 bill even though we had an unlimited tariff. In comparison, iPhone and Android offer us “more than you can eat” data deals.
At the risk of producing claim chowder, what Michael Dell said about Apple a decade ago goes double for RIM.
Having witnessed the disdain with which Blackberry treats the app developer community first hand, it boggles the mind as to why they place so much emphasis on a “tonnage of apps”.
We are based in South Africa and on two occasions were to meet their local managing director, but he did not pitch. Once he claimed to have missed a bus and on the other occasion he had more pressing issues to attend to. Never heard from him again.
Then we won the local leg of their Super App Developer Challenge. Our prize? A Blackberry Torch which is network locked to AT&T and therefore unusable here in South Africa. Several emails to resolve this complication went unanswered and our prize is now rusting away in a drawer somewhere.
The importance their joint CEO’s place on a tonnage of apps simply does not add up when you look at the way they bite the hand that feed them.
Post Script:
The complimentary phones Nokia gave us, are however being used on a daily basis to innovate new apps – mostly utility type apps for enterprise clients (E.g. call recording, expense management etc.)
Good context, badly written article.
PS: Spellcheckers are out there, use them.
Indeed. Read this for a similar take on RIM:
http://www.asymco.com/2011/03/25/understanding-rims-tablet-platform-app-strategy/
“Jamie Murai, an experienced app developer”
LOL. Was that a JOKE? Thanks for the laugh!
Apple has Boot Camp. I guess no one is writing apps for the Mac OS X anymore?
Oh yeah, and did you see EA’s Need for Speed game running on the Playbook? Clearly it runs poorly in an “app player”. -sarcasm-
Honeycomb? Why bother releasing an app player for Honeycomb apps if there are currently just too few of them as we speak? Who cares if they are “designed for tablets”? Android 2.3 has 1000x more apps. Judging from the overwhelming positive reaction of blog and forum dwellers, it was a good and welcome move. You’re just complaining for the sake of complaining. I’m sure if RIM had announced a Honeycomb app player instead, you’d still whine and argue that it was a bad move because of whatever reason (e.g. too few apps, not yet mature, etc.).
Anyway, this article is just regurgitating whatever’s been written in other sites, whether it’s insightful or utter non-sense.
Who cares about native applications? RIM has the WebWorks SDK with a good web rendering engine that allow developers to make rich web applications packaged like a native app.
@George
“And I realize that supporting multiple SDKs does not send a clear message to developers. But you know what other OS supports multiple SDKs? Microsoft Windows. And it seems to be doing well in the market. Windows can run apps coded against … why is it so bad that a tablet supports different technologies to create apps?”
Nice strawman. Playbook =/= Windows.
Whats bad is the clear message that the “support” of different technologies is just a cynical grab for “app tonnage”… and developers should have no expectation that RIM will continue to support “app players” once native apps are viable.
Developers should have the same reaction to this that they had to Apple’s initial release of the iPhone, when it was “Only Apple can build native apps, everybody else can just write web-apps”. Yeah, that was greeted -warmly- by the developer community.
Guys, I’m not going to pretend that I’m a developer as people often do in threads like this one, and I haven’t programmed for fifteen years. But it seems to me that a number of people here are making a big mistake.
It’s come from several sources, as Gasśee has also mentioned here, that Android apps will need to be ported, or recompiled, before they will run in RIM’s player. What this means is that the Playbook will NOT be running Android apps. They will be running some sort of bastardized version. As we all know, when an app is ported over to another system, even if it isn’t running in a player rather than natively, it’s slow, lacks features, and tends to be buggy.
The developer has to decide how much time she will spend on fixing these issues. She may not want to spend much time on it at all. It depends on the payback. How much of that will there be here? RIM is giving us a very optimistic number of 6 million Playbooks sold this year, but few people think they have a chance at that, and that sales will be, at best, half that.
I would imagine that developers overall will be wary of the platform, especially if what Jamie says isn’t fixed. It will be much worse for Android developers for several reasons. One reason is all the work they will need to do without knowing how much that effort will pay off in performance or cash, if any.
The second reason is that these Android apps are, as has also been mentioned, phone apps, not tablet apps. As someone here said, Google’s method allows those apps to work on a bigger screen. Well, yes, sort of. But many, if not most of them don’t, or do in a very unsatisfactory way. Google’s method requires the app to stretch to fill the screen, even if the screen proportions are very different. Anyone who has seen apps on a tablet knows just how bad that can be for many apps. And there’s no way for the user to know this until they get the app. So this will be something else the developer will have to sort out—rewriting the UI to fit the 1024•600 screen. Assuming they care enough, that is.
So no, RIM isn’t going to benefit much from the Android app store. No guarantee how many developers will bother to port their apps over. No guarantee how many that do, will do a good job (and Android apps in general aren’t known for quality as it is). And no guarantee what the ones that are ported over will do to the Playbook reputation if, as is likely, they look and perform poorly, as RIM themselves are telling us to expect.
I had a Blackberry before the iPhone came out. I had to wait 18 months after the iPhone announcement to make the switch. It lead to my comparing what I had to what I could have had. And to this day I can see that nothing had really changed at RIM. They simply don’t get what’s going on in the mobile space, they’re too entrenched in their own echo chamber.
RIP RIM.
A poster called Matt said, “Who cares about native applications? RIM has the WebWorks SDK with a good web rendering engine that allow developers to make rich web applications packaged like a native app.”
Right, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
But that doesn’t mean all ways are equally good. I have a couple of “apps” that are built this way, but so many more that would be unacceptably bad. Take for instance my cherished Chinese language study tool, which does real-time OCR on the camera’s view of text, has a superior writing-recognition method, speaks words from multiple dictionaries and has its own database of text clippings for instant translation and other study.
Not everybody wants a high-powered language tool. Most of us are content with expense tracking/reporting, book readers that present text less uglified than the HTML tools allow, occasionally edit a video or use Photoshop type tools. Corporations create custom customer, service, inventory, surveying, etc apps.
And on competing mobile OS environments, that class of apps is currently NOT written in AIR or HTML. The environments may be sufficiently expressive and sufficiently powerful to handle them, though I doubt that, but developers have not tried to push in that direction. It’s sort of like trying to write love poetry in German, or perhaps procedural instructions in Swahili. Some languages match up better than others to certain tasks.
RIM is trying to battle the perception that users bring devices into the corporation that then allow the dissemination of corporate tools and info systems. My sense is that RIM’s best market is in the more traditional IT shop that produces high-efficiency, targeted tools for its employees. And those shops have nearly nothing today from RIM except promises for the future.
Microsoft didn’t save Apple from Bankruptcy, I’m so sick of hearing that. In 1997 Microsoft bought $150,000,000.00 of Apple stock, which was like me giving my 10 year old a dollar. Apple had lost over a billion the year before, and that piddly amount from Microsoft was a drop in the bucket to what Apple needed. Amelio raised a Billion by selling off inventory for cash, thats what held off the dogs until Steve to could turn the ship around.
People who lives in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Jean-Louis Gassée used to be the head of Be Inc. — which as their last ditch effort to make a living, created BeIA for internet appliances. Guess what? It took Be Inc. forever to create BeIA and it took Sony to create the eVilla internet appliance. 3Com managed to take QNX and put it into the Audrey internet applaince in less time, use less hardware footprint, and started selling the internet appliance. 3Com managed to discontinue the Audrey even before BeIA/Sony launch their product.
Then JLG went to become chairman of PalmSource — which sold NOT a single copy of their new version of their PalmOS to anyone.
@TechU: I know and respect QNX very much, it’s a very good OS, one of the best if not the best embedded OS. At Be, we looked at it (more than a decade ago, admittedly) and came away impressed. But this isn’t about the “OS” it’s about the application framework(s) and their associated tools. The OS kernels Android and iOS are based on mayyer much less than the developer environment, the singularity of purpose, the entire ecosystem. JLG
@janet: The Be and PalmSource experiences inform my comments on RIM’s strategy and pronouncements. One we sold Be to Palm: The Internet Appliance market failed to materialize, not for Be, nor for anyone else. The other reason was Microsoft’s shenanigans; we settled that out of court for enough money to buy fresh tires for my wheelchair
As for PalmSource, after the Be acquisition, Palm split in two companies, hardware and software, PalmOne and PalmSource. I was director of 3Com at the time. A little later, after Eric Benhamou (then Chairman of both Palm and 3Com) had the opportunity to inventory the Palm situation in more depth, I traded my 3Com board position for that of PalmSource Chairman.
I quickly concluded PalmSource, although adequately financed (lots of cash in the bank), wouldn’t make enough headway as an independent company. The board decided to sell the company. Shares were trading at $7.25 when we made the decision. After a three-way auction also involving Motorola and PalmOne, we sold PalmSource to the Japanese Aspect for $18.50, thus making good money for our shareholders. Very instructive adventure. JLG
@Intosh: You’re right, Apple has BootCamp (and a couple of virtual machines: VMware and Parallels). None involve any porting, recompiling, App Store approval. In the BootCamp case there is no “app player”, Windows app run on naked Intel hardware, they run on what is, in effect, a PC.
Further, I don’t recall seeing Dear Leader on stage, bragging about any kind of Windows “application tonnage”.
You’re also right about my always quoting my sources and/or pointing to what others have said about the topic. I wish I could have dissented, I loved my Blackberries… JLG
@ the frog: Thanks for asking. I’m not short or long on RIM. For the record, I don’t play the stock market: across the table I see people with bigger brains, bigger wallets and bigger computers, I can’t win. In plainer English: I don’t own _any_ publicly-traded stock, directly or indirectly. As a venture investor, I have an interest in a small number of start-ups. JLG
@janet, thank you for reminding us how intimately familiar JLG is with the challenges of success in this industry; it gives his insights even more heft.
From your own expertise (or ability to google facts), which of his comments are most perspicacious? Which contrast most starkly with your (I’m guessing here) 30 years industry knowledge?
@Hamranhansenhansen: Very interesting perspective. Imagine RIM courting iOS developers for C/C++ apps. I haven’t looked closely at the PlayBook NDK APIs but my recollection of QNX is it ought to do a good job supporting “close-to-the-metal” applications. As for RIM and developers, the few I spoke with aren’t impressed. The execs aren’t steeped in the same culture as Android or Apple execs. JLG
“The obits are a bit premature”: I agree. There’s none in my note. And the RIM co-CEOs are known to be feisty, resourceful; they’ll keep fighting.
Profits for 1988 were arise to accept been up by 49% added than in 1987. By 1989, Louis Vuitton came to accomplish 130 food worldwide.
It’s hard to take this article seriously when the author can’t even spell BlackBerry correctly. Yes, BlackBerry has two capital B’s. JLG, if you’re such an expert on RIM, why don’t you know how to spell its products??
@IHEARTBB: You’re right my mistake. Two capital Bs: BlackBerry. My humble apologies for this terrible, terrible disqualifying mistake. It’s great to have discerning readers like you. JLG
@IHEARTBB, my condolences if you’re upset as many BB boosters are about the shellacking the RIM stock took today.
If it’s any consolation, I doubt any of the Doubters here were sellers today. Myself, my clients’ mandates don’t allow for holding Canadian shares directly, so I never could’ve bought them. I doubt anybody here was out to get the company.
Quite the opposite: much as we might favor some companies, I see only regret for RIM in how it has been so challenged in the disrupted industry since 2007. As you see, I have especially misunderstood what I take to be intemperate remarks and missed emphases by the RIM leadership. These are supposed to be responsible leaders and their bluster and pretense has only ended up misdirecting many who trusted the company.
The RIM developer relations guy seems like an upright guy, openly giving honest and helpful feedback in sometimes challenging situations. But when the CEO calls developers’ work “tonnage” and deprecates the importance of apps, all that patient work goes straight to the shitcan.
I see RIM as having been in the worst spot of all the pre-iPhone incumbents. Their success in low-cost but high-reliability messaging led the company to dismiss the shiny Apple toys, and when the company gulped hard and committed to competing with the new paradigm of user-selected and -supplied devices with IT support, the existing technical framework was a bad misfit, too: QNX rode to the rescue but it is too power- and battery-hungry for the svelte devices that all the current users had. I think that the Playbook bridge was the right answer: show users you understand touchscreen and the ocean of consumer-friendly apps, while you push Moore’s Law to squeeze into your handsets.
It is only the rushed execution, failure to involve developers more honestly and fully, and the hard cold fact that Apple redefined this market to ITS strengths, that set up RIM, and its stock for the pounding it took today. Given my comments above (and on other forums), it’s actually more surprising to me that the stock has not cratered before. RIM has a very difficult road ahead and it’ll take some inspiration plus sober, very hard work to recover its previous position.
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