Doesn’t Anybody Here Know How to Play This Game?
Bad sign: Developers abandoning RIM for iOS and Android. The reasons will shock you — if you haven’t been paying attention. Among them:
“You have to put your resources where the growth is,” Seesmic Chief Executive Officer Loic Le Meur said in an interview. “It’s coming down to the explosive growth of the iPhone and the Android operating systems.”
And:
“As soon as RIM brought in a touchscreen and mixed it with a thumbwheel, a keyboard and shortcut keys, it made it really difficult and expensive to develop across devices,” said Purple Forge CEO Brian Hurley. “What Apple scored big on is having a touch screen and a button and that’s it.”
And:
“In deploying Apple applications, there are very few surprises,” said Hurley. “In Android, there are increasingly more surprises. But in BlackBerry, there are immediately lots of gotchas across the board.”
One developer couldn’t even get his app to load on RIM’s best-forgotten PlayBook.
RIM’s major problem versus iOS and Android has been its incomplete ecosystem. And the problem is getting worse, not better.
Back in the 70s VCR format war, Beta was the slightly better technology but VHS won because the content providers went with it. Having worked in mainframe software for some number of years, I can affirm that having 3rd party providers want to develop for your platform is the difference between success and failure.
That plus the fact that Sony refused to license the Betamax system to other companies to produce recorders under their own brands using the Sony system. The developer of the VCR immediately licensed the system and within a short time there were many brands of VCR’s on the market and the inevitable price competition began. Bye bye, Betamax.
Now the question becomes, which OS will BlackBerry pivot to in future hardware designs? Odds are, Android — unless Microsoft pounces with a sweet licensing deal on WP7 or Win8/WP8.
RIM is dead, although with its large cash reserves it will take a while dying. Enterprises are finding that there are cheaper email alternatives than the Blackberry now available with as much security as RIM used to offer.
The sales trends show Android growing dramatically in market share in recent quarters, Apple holding or slightly growing in market share, and everyone else dying in the weeds. NoWin isn’t even going to arrive for several quarters and may actually die faster than RIM from a poorer cash position and burnrate. The WP7 / WP8 system has no real adherents, no real ecosystem to generate interest, and with Microsoft buying SKYPE, the wireless telco’s now have a reason to hate Microsoft. I’ve seen reports that subsidized Windows phones have disappeared from wireless stores since the SKYPE purchase.
Stephen, you have a link to the right to Eric S. Raymond. He’s been discussing the smartphone market share thing for awhile and with some fascinating sales data analysis.
Yeah, I’ve read bunches of Eric’s stuff, and he does have some sharp analysis. But he has an anti-Apple bias and a geek’s view of devices — both of which I think lead him to some fanciful conclusions about the market.
On the other side, you should take a look at Horace Dediu’s Asymco. He might lean a little too far on the pro-Apple side, but I think his understanding is deeper. Also, while he’s a geek, he knows geeks aren’t the major buyers of consumer widgets.
Somewhere between the two men is probably the truth.
Indeed, Eric is not the Apple fan that you are, but its less an “anti-Apple” bias than a fanatical pro-Open Source bias. (One I admittedly share).
But ignore that and look at the sales data, the activation data and the market share data and regardless of where you come on the Apple/Android divide, RIM and the rest are buttered toast.