Exxodium

Doing Nothing, Going Nowhere

There is no excuse as to why RIM is failing as badly as it is today.

RIM itself has an Apple-like situation on its hands; it controls the hardware of it’s mobile phones, and it also controls the software. So why, then, is the Blackberry failing so hard and bleeding market share?

This bit of news helps to put some of it in perspective. An anonymous person raises some good points, and RIM responds with nothing more than 300 words of corporate spin.

RIM has the facilities and the resources to engineer some innovative products. Instead of doing that, however, they’ve decided they just need to re-release the same phone over and over again. What was the difference between the Bold 9000 and the Bold 9500?

The new Bold was just smaller.

The only BlackBerry that has been truly innovative in recent memory is the Torch. But even that was dead on arrival. It was slow. The screen had a particularly horrible pixel density/resolution. It was outdated before it even hit the shelves.

The BB OS itself is beginning to feel like the Mac OS of old; layers of spaghetti code. Options upon options, menus upon menus. Really bad UI design. Want to change your ringtone or notification tone? Want to change your fonts? Good luck with that one, because most settings are several menus deep. The OS feels overcomplicated when it shouldn’t. What’s a “Level 1 Message”?

Maybe when RIM’S QNX is brought to it’s phones, this problem will handle itself. But what RIM really needs to do is jettison the BB OS and start anew with something truly ground-breaking and dead-simple to use. Microsoft was able to do it going from WM6.5 to Windows Phone 7, why can’t RIM?

In my opinion, the bigger problem with RIM isn’t the hardware, it’s the software. While the hardware may be outdated upon release, that can be mitigated to a degree with software optimization. (See: The iPhone 3GS) The BB OS feels really slow, no matter which phone you use it on.

Lastly, I really believe RIM needs to make the boldest move ever and turn it’s back on the corporate sector. As much as I’m sure that corporations are the only reason RIM is even turning a profit anymore, RIM needs to turn it’s engineering efforts and marketing toward the consumer market. Consumer-focused companies like Apple and Google and even Microsoft are already making inroads into the corporate sector where RIM reigns supreme. But if RIM rests on it’s laurels here and gets shoved out of that market by its competition, that could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, so to speak.

They had the right idea with the Torch…almost. Maybe some better specifications (though it doesn’t have to be some dual core monster) and a better OS that’s more intuitive and easier to use, and RIM would have a phone that doesn’t suck. The new Bold might also be a step in the right direction, but unfortunately it too is probably too shackled down by lackluster software to even be given the time of day.