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RIM Offering Free PlayBook Tablets to Android Developers
Personally, I would have gone with the following headline: RIM Offering A Cup Of Shitty, Hot Coffee To Those In Hell.
A Shakeup In Name Only?
Peter Kafka reporting on new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins’ call with analysts this morning:
And the new tech that the company has in the pipeline — a revised version of its PlayBook tablet, and a new operating system due out in the fall — are great. You’ll see: “I don’t think there is a drastic change needed.”
RIM is still awash in revenue, so there is undoubtedly push-back to really shaking stuff up. But this sure sounds like RIM’s new CEO fails to see the writing on the wall, just as his predecessors clearly did.
And that shouldn’t be surprising. As Kafka notes, Heins has been RIM’s COO for the past four years. He’s the guy former co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis were grooming to take their place one day. That day came sooner than they expected, but all parties seem to be failing to acknowledge why.
RIM needs to quit dicking around with the PlayBook and focus on either what they’re good at (enterprise-focused smartphones) or something entirely new that blows away the market the way the first BlackBerrys did. To be honest, they should probably be doing both if they want to exist in 5 years.
The most troubling thing Heins said today:
Q: Please go into detail: What are your priorities for the next 100 days?
Heins: We need to get better at market communications.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Tags tech RIM blackberry playbook
RIM’s Rumored 10-inch PlayBook: A Bigger Mistake
Great headline by Kevin C. Tofel.
HP killed the TouchPad way too early. RIM will apparently kill the PlayBook far too late. They need to kill it right now and focus. But they won’t.
Android Needs Bonk
This is brilliant. The sales of all the Android tablets combined plus the PlayBook may equal the sales of the 3DO.
Meanwhile, TurboGrafx 16 sales are roughly five times the combination.
And the iPad is three times TurboGrafx 16.
“We don’t do Android.”
Phil McKinney, HP’s president and CTO of personal systems group tells Fast Company
Richard Kerris, HP’s VP of developer relations (and a former Apple executive) goes further:
“I don’t see why we would. Just because McDonald’s sells a billion hamburgers, doesn’t mean we want to go into that business if we’re a restaurant. We have a better solution with WebOS. Let’s go after the RIMs and the Androids. We have a strong play there: a better UI that’s more consistent.”
Author Austin Carr makes the case that HP is shifting towards a model much more akin to Apple’s “control everything” flavor.
Of course, when I made this argument last year, based on what sources were saying just after the Palm deal, HP more or less said I was crazy and flat-out wrong.
From the looks of it, it turns out they were saying this because I was exactly right — they perhaps just didn’t want to show their hand just yet.
Now that the cards are on the table, there’s no denying it.
This reminds me a bit of Facebook’s nonsense Porject Spartan spin. “We’re not going after Apple,” said as they creep up behind Apple.
[via Daring Fireball]
TechCrunch Review: RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook Enters The Tablet Wars
Tags tech vault blackberry rim playbook
RIM, Playbook, And the Microsoft Cleanup
I got to play with a Playbook briefly a couple weeks ago. It looked pretty nice and seemed to run smoothly. But the RIM guy must have said “Flash” 200 times. I simply don’t care if it runs Flash or not.
Others might, but even then, it’s probably item 20 on the list of important things. If that’s going to be their main selling point, they’re in trouble. And when the Flash was shown in action, guess what, it looked jittery. No surprise there.
Speaking of important things on a tablet — number one: apps. Running Android apps might be a good idea — if they weren’t Android 2.3 apps which aren’t tailored for tablets in any way, shape, or form. Literally.
But the most important point is the ending of Krazit’s article.
Perhaps the old-school PC company, Microsoft, is finally ready to make an honest man or woman out of all the rumormongers predicting a Microsoft-RIM merger for years.
Phase one of Microsoft’s catch-up in mobile plan was Windows Phone. Phase two was the Nokia partnership. Phase three may well be an acquisition of RIM.
And Microsoft is actually in a position to do it (from a regulatory perspective) because Apple and Google are utterly dominating the space.
Notes