So Halliburton has decided to give their 4000+ Blackberrys the flick for iPhones.
This is not good news for RIM.
They’ve been losing corporate customers at a massive rate and their much vaunted Playbook has just turned out to be just another very expensive paving brick. Just to move stock they’ve had to decimate price and in Australia some carriers are giving away a playbook with every Blackberry activation and they’re still having trouble moving stock.
RIM is a living (?!) example of what I described in an article I wrote for Australian Anthill a long time ago If you don’t change, you will die!
The problem with this company has always been that they thought because they created the smartphone market they knew what everyone wanted. The reality is they didn’t and the market is punishing them for it now.
They took their eye off the ball and it hit them right between the eyes.
Showing posts with label RIM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RIM. Show all posts
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
The Blackberry Zombiepocalypse Spreads
So RIM have had a ‘core switch failure’.
Blackberry devices all over the planet started imitating the sales numbers of the Deadbook and finally Jim Balsille and Mike Lazaridis stump up and say “whoops…our bad”.
Yeah…I’m sure sending out a video apology on the launch day for the iPhone 4S is going to help. Following it up with a few free apps isn’t really going help all that much guys.
Faced with plummeting market share, wrong headed thinking and launching an unfinished product to market with the vague promise of “we’ll fix it with software updates soon…promise…really…”, isn’t going to help.
Not only has RIM lost the ‘cool’ factor, they’re losing everyone’s confidence.
RIM should put Jim and Mike out to pasture so they can worry about ice hockey teams and telling each other that they’re the best.
Stick a fork in RIM, they’re done.
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Vodafail and RIM: A match made in Heaven
So rumours are flying that Vodafone may want to buy RIM.
So lets see, the carrier who has managed to comprehensively screw themselves and the Australian consumer is going to ‘buddy up’ with RIM who displayed breathtaking arrogance and gave away a market they created and delivered below standard, half finished products.
Excellent!
The only winners out of this one are going to be the RIM shareholders who may actually be able to get a reasonable price, assuming the rumours are true, and they haven’t been started by some Wall Street analyst desperate to dump his ‘dog’ stocks before bonus time at a price inflated by a stupid rumour.
Nahhhh. That’d never happen.
So lets see, the carrier who has managed to comprehensively screw themselves and the Australian consumer is going to ‘buddy up’ with RIM who displayed breathtaking arrogance and gave away a market they created and delivered below standard, half finished products.
Excellent!
The only winners out of this one are going to be the RIM shareholders who may actually be able to get a reasonable price, assuming the rumours are true, and they haven’t been started by some Wall Street analyst desperate to dump his ‘dog’ stocks before bonus time at a price inflated by a stupid rumour.
Nahhhh. That’d never happen.
Monday, September 26, 2011
RIM and the undead tablet
I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about the Blackberry Playbook and I realised that we’re talking about the walking dead.
At least HP had the foresight to take their tablet out behind the woodshed and put a bullet into its head.
RIM on the other hand are just watching this thing slowly turn into the living dead while the eternal optimists deny that something as unbelievable as a zombie tablet could exist, coming up with kinds of bizarre theories as to why this couldn’t be.
Let’s look at the facts. RIM aren’t shipping a whole lot of these things to anyone. Their share price is tanking. The only people that use Blackberry’s now are those that are stuck with them and can’t wait to get to another, more flexible platform and the fanboys who just can’t bring themselves to accept that they may have backed the wrong horse.
The fanboy sites are using the most fantastic theories to suggest that this zombie tablet is actually alive and kicking, despite the manufacturer scaling back their manufacturing lines for the Deadbook.
Unless…maybe…this is some new secret manufacturing/marketing strategy where you scale back the line to lull your opposition into a false sense of security before you spend more money with the manufacturer ramping up the manufacturing line again, and rehiring the laid off staff from that line to beat the crap out of your, now, unsuspecting opposition.
Yeah. Somehow I don’t think that’s the plan no matter how many ways you count downloads of a free application as a way of estimating device sales.
The truth is, if this thing was selling RIM would be trumpeting it from way up on high. They’re not. That means its not.
Given market sentiment on RIM at the moment if the Deadbook had a sell through rate that was even approaching acceptable Mike and Jim would be telling the planet every way they can.
Unless RIM can pull off a spectacular turnaround with the Deadbook and upcoming Blackberry devices they’re on the long slow road to oblivion.
Even in emerging markets Blackberry’s are starting to slowly lose ground to iOS and Android devices based on the handsets I’m seeing people using on the street throughout the Asia Pacific region.
At least HP had the foresight to take their tablet out behind the woodshed and put a bullet into its head.
RIM on the other hand are just watching this thing slowly turn into the living dead while the eternal optimists deny that something as unbelievable as a zombie tablet could exist, coming up with kinds of bizarre theories as to why this couldn’t be.
Let’s look at the facts. RIM aren’t shipping a whole lot of these things to anyone. Their share price is tanking. The only people that use Blackberry’s now are those that are stuck with them and can’t wait to get to another, more flexible platform and the fanboys who just can’t bring themselves to accept that they may have backed the wrong horse.
The fanboy sites are using the most fantastic theories to suggest that this zombie tablet is actually alive and kicking, despite the manufacturer scaling back their manufacturing lines for the Deadbook.
Unless…maybe…this is some new secret manufacturing/marketing strategy where you scale back the line to lull your opposition into a false sense of security before you spend more money with the manufacturer ramping up the manufacturing line again, and rehiring the laid off staff from that line to beat the crap out of your, now, unsuspecting opposition.
Yeah. Somehow I don’t think that’s the plan no matter how many ways you count downloads of a free application as a way of estimating device sales.
The truth is, if this thing was selling RIM would be trumpeting it from way up on high. They’re not. That means its not.
Given market sentiment on RIM at the moment if the Deadbook had a sell through rate that was even approaching acceptable Mike and Jim would be telling the planet every way they can.
Unless RIM can pull off a spectacular turnaround with the Deadbook and upcoming Blackberry devices they’re on the long slow road to oblivion.
Even in emerging markets Blackberry’s are starting to slowly lose ground to iOS and Android devices based on the handsets I’m seeing people using on the street throughout the Asia Pacific region.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Is the Playbook a Deadbook?
I just don’t get RIM’s Playbook…and from the sounds of things neither does anyone else.
On their latest earnings call RIM said they only shipped 200,000 units in the last quarter. They shipped 500,000 in the quarter previous to that. I’m guessing that means that some poor retailer has enough of these things sitting in a warehouse somewhere to pave an awful lot of driveways.
I’d love to see the sell through rates on this one because I’d say that this story Best Buy discounts Playbook has more to it than this story Harvey Norman reports 'fantastic' PlayBook sales.
Of course it depends on your definition of fantastic. I mean if you’ve got 100 units in your warehouse and you sell 75 then they are fantastic sales, if you’ve got 10,000 and you sell 75, well, not so much.
RIM also said that they shipped less Blackberry handsets than they forecast even though they increased the number of subscribers. If you take into account timing on contracts and the slow movement of corporates to other smartphone platforms I’d have to say that Jim Balsille and Mike Lazaridis should start worrying.
What are they going to do when slowing sales at the front end of the pipeline starts translating to reducing subscriber counts at the back end as users start moving to other smartphone platforms?
How is RIM going to turn this around, or, at some time in the future will their decomposing corporate corpse just be a footnote on some other company’s balance sheet?
On their latest earnings call RIM said they only shipped 200,000 units in the last quarter. They shipped 500,000 in the quarter previous to that. I’m guessing that means that some poor retailer has enough of these things sitting in a warehouse somewhere to pave an awful lot of driveways.
I’d love to see the sell through rates on this one because I’d say that this story Best Buy discounts Playbook has more to it than this story Harvey Norman reports 'fantastic' PlayBook sales.
Of course it depends on your definition of fantastic. I mean if you’ve got 100 units in your warehouse and you sell 75 then they are fantastic sales, if you’ve got 10,000 and you sell 75, well, not so much.
RIM also said that they shipped less Blackberry handsets than they forecast even though they increased the number of subscribers. If you take into account timing on contracts and the slow movement of corporates to other smartphone platforms I’d have to say that Jim Balsille and Mike Lazaridis should start worrying.
What are they going to do when slowing sales at the front end of the pipeline starts translating to reducing subscriber counts at the back end as users start moving to other smartphone platforms?
How is RIM going to turn this around, or, at some time in the future will their decomposing corporate corpse just be a footnote on some other company’s balance sheet?
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Blackberry to offer price cuts on the Deadbook
According to this report Jim Balsille said that Blackberry is planning to reduce the price of the Deadbook to get those sales numbers moving.
Might I suggest $99.
It seemed to work for HP.
Might I suggest $99.
It seemed to work for HP.
Friday, September 9, 2011
Its Finally Finished…almost
I stumbled across an article on the Time online website recently entitled It Just Doesn’t Work: Why New Tech Products Are Increasingly Unsatisfying. It struck a chord with me because I’ve seen so much of technology delivered to market that was so obviously ‘half-baked’.
In the drive to get ‘mindshare’ products are being released to market in ever more rapid cycles. The tech just doesn’t have enough time to get fully baked.
The thing is the tech companies know that most ‘early adopters’ (read: unknowing beta testers) will find ways to justify the quirky behaviour of their shiny new toy even though most people would call it a piece of shit and return the unfinished mess to the manufacturer vowing never to buy another one of their products. Ever.
Its been an axiom of the tech industry that you never buy a product from Microsoft until it gets to Version 3 because the earlier ones just suck.
The article quotes a leaked email from HP’s Jon Rubenstein talking about the, now freshly buried, TouchPad. The part that interested me was:
Today we bring the HP TouchPad and webOS 3.0 to the world. The HP team has achieved something extraordinary – especially when you consider that it’s been just one year since our work on the TouchPad began in earnest. Today also marks the start of a new era for HP as our vision for connected mobility begins to take form - an ecosystem of services, applications and devices connected seamlessly by webOS.
If you’ve seen the recent TouchPad reviews you know that the industry understands HP’s vision and sees the same potential in webOS as we do. David Pogue from the New York Times says “there are signs of greatness here.” (I’ve included links to David’s review and others below.) You’ve also seen that reviewers rightly note things we need to improve about the webOS experience. The good news is that most of the issues they cite are already known to us and will be addressed in short order by over-the-air software and app catalog updates. We still have work to do to make webOS the platform we know it can be, but remember…..it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
People don’t want to wait for ‘the next update’ they want it to work out of the box to the level of their expectations.
The TouchPad didn’t, neither did RIM’s Playbook or Vista or so many other technological balls ups.
Rubenstein also quotes some of the first reviews for Mac OS X in his e-mail:
"...overall the software is sluggish" "...there are no quality apps to use, so it won’t last" "...it's just not making sense...."
It’s hard to believe these statements described MacOS X - a platform that would go on to change the landscape of Silicon Valley in ways that no one could have imagined.
Great pick up Jon!
That was 10 years ago.
Ten years ago people would accept stuff that won’t get out of the starting gate today.
You bet the farm on the expectation that people would patiently wait until you got it right while providing HP with another revenue stream. You lost.
In the drive to get ‘mindshare’ products are being released to market in ever more rapid cycles. The tech just doesn’t have enough time to get fully baked.
The thing is the tech companies know that most ‘early adopters’ (read: unknowing beta testers) will find ways to justify the quirky behaviour of their shiny new toy even though most people would call it a piece of shit and return the unfinished mess to the manufacturer vowing never to buy another one of their products. Ever.
Its been an axiom of the tech industry that you never buy a product from Microsoft until it gets to Version 3 because the earlier ones just suck.
The article quotes a leaked email from HP’s Jon Rubenstein talking about the, now freshly buried, TouchPad. The part that interested me was:
Today we bring the HP TouchPad and webOS 3.0 to the world. The HP team has achieved something extraordinary – especially when you consider that it’s been just one year since our work on the TouchPad began in earnest. Today also marks the start of a new era for HP as our vision for connected mobility begins to take form - an ecosystem of services, applications and devices connected seamlessly by webOS.
If you’ve seen the recent TouchPad reviews you know that the industry understands HP’s vision and sees the same potential in webOS as we do. David Pogue from the New York Times says “there are signs of greatness here.” (I’ve included links to David’s review and others below.) You’ve also seen that reviewers rightly note things we need to improve about the webOS experience. The good news is that most of the issues they cite are already known to us and will be addressed in short order by over-the-air software and app catalog updates. We still have work to do to make webOS the platform we know it can be, but remember…..it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
People don’t want to wait for ‘the next update’ they want it to work out of the box to the level of their expectations.
The TouchPad didn’t, neither did RIM’s Playbook or Vista or so many other technological balls ups.
Rubenstein also quotes some of the first reviews for Mac OS X in his e-mail:
"...overall the software is sluggish" "...there are no quality apps to use, so it won’t last" "...it's just not making sense...."
It’s hard to believe these statements described MacOS X - a platform that would go on to change the landscape of Silicon Valley in ways that no one could have imagined.
Great pick up Jon!
That was 10 years ago.
Ten years ago people would accept stuff that won’t get out of the starting gate today.
You bet the farm on the expectation that people would patiently wait until you got it right while providing HP with another revenue stream. You lost.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Can RIM pull of a Lazarus like resurrection?
Boy Genius Report recently had a piece on RIM and whether Blackberrys with the QNX Operating System will turn their fortunes around.
I’m not going to regurgitate the article here, but, I’m not so sure.
While I have a soft spot for Blackberry and their platform I don’t think that some new, well built hardware and a new OS is going to change the tide for them. Neither is an ‘Android layer’ that lets a Blackberry run Android apps.
Here are some of the practicalities, that I think, get in the way of a resurrected RIM.
The Cool Factor.
The Blackberry isn’t cool any more. I don’t hear of executives lining up at the door to their IT department demanding a Blackberry. An iPhone or an Android phone, yes, but a Blackberry, not so much.
The BES
More and more of the functionality that required a BES is now being found as native features in a wider and wider range of handsets. So why need a BES? If you don’t need a BES what’s the compelling story for a Blackberry over something else?
Blackberry Messenger
This was an awesome tool. Its becoming replicated functionality in other handsets. iOS is looking like its going to have something like it and you can bet that Android and WinMoPho devices will have something very similar as well.
I suppose the question is “if there was no real difference in features and functionality would you buy a Blackberry if you could choose from all the other smartphones out there”?
Sadly, I don’t think I would and I’m not so sure that I’m alone in that thinking.
I’m not going to regurgitate the article here, but, I’m not so sure.
While I have a soft spot for Blackberry and their platform I don’t think that some new, well built hardware and a new OS is going to change the tide for them. Neither is an ‘Android layer’ that lets a Blackberry run Android apps.
Here are some of the practicalities, that I think, get in the way of a resurrected RIM.
The Cool Factor.
The Blackberry isn’t cool any more. I don’t hear of executives lining up at the door to their IT department demanding a Blackberry. An iPhone or an Android phone, yes, but a Blackberry, not so much.
The BES
More and more of the functionality that required a BES is now being found as native features in a wider and wider range of handsets. So why need a BES? If you don’t need a BES what’s the compelling story for a Blackberry over something else?
Blackberry Messenger
This was an awesome tool. Its becoming replicated functionality in other handsets. iOS is looking like its going to have something like it and you can bet that Android and WinMoPho devices will have something very similar as well.
I suppose the question is “if there was no real difference in features and functionality would you buy a Blackberry if you could choose from all the other smartphones out there”?
Sadly, I don’t think I would and I’m not so sure that I’m alone in that thinking.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)