Three Strikes and Your Out

How long before we will be saying R.I.P RIM? In the last year RIM has made what I consider to be at three major errors.

1. Play book with no email: If there is one thing that I think was universally accepted at one time is that RIM has made its name early on in the email space. Given that - it blows my mind that they would ship the iPad Killer, also known as the Playbook, without native support for email intially. You could get it but only by tethering to a phone. FAIL #1
2. RIM 10: Last week RIM made a big announcement about the new OS for Blackberry devices called RIM 10. Perhaps this is going to be revolutionary (I doubt it) but I found it hard to believe that during the conference they provided developers with not only crippled cell phones (no wifi or calling capability) but they did not even have the new OS on it. Just a few new API calls. In fact no one knows that type of hardware of functionality the new phones will have. But here are a few so you can start developing for something invisible. FAIL #2
3. Buy me a developer: To get developers on board they have instutued a new program that will guarantee you $10,000 in sales for the first year. There are a few simple stipulations. The application must be certified by Blackberry which makes sense so there are not a bunch of “Hello World” apps out there. If your application only creates $2,000 worth of sales, RIM will make up the difference to get you whole to the $10,000. On one side of things I could see some merits to a program like this. Its a incentive to keep existing developers and brings new ones to the platform. But I think it will fail. If the platform is good I think developers would want to develop for it without the incentive. Developers that already have strong apps I imagine will make more than $10,000 so that is not a big deal. But even for new developers to RIM OS I would imagine that it would cost more than $10,000 in labor. So perhaps you are breaking even. Buying a developer to move people to your platform never sounds like a good idea. FAIL #3