People probably know that BlackBerry (the company formerly known as RIM) published their BlackBerry 10 devices few days back. Reception has been somewhat lukewarm, at least based on what I saw in Twitter. At first glance device looks like and iPhone 5, UI reminds of an Android phone, iconography in idle reminds me of Symbian Belle, Swipe gestures of MeeGo… Hopefully it’s “best of all the worlds”. Application offering is terrible as they basically start from scratch (Like Nokia did with MeeGo).
Next 2 full quarters (that is up to end of September this year) will give us a hint how this will work in favor of BlackBerry. I have said they are looking at the same setup as Nokia had at end of 2010/beginning of 2011. New cool looking OS needs to win back the lost market. But let’s wait for the future before we evaluate that, now it would be nice to see the past. It’s here:
This is the sales loss Nokia and BlackBerry have taken in the recent years. It is rather interesting to note that they had their peak sales almost identical times and then have gone up and down in pretty much same pace. There is a small shift but please remember, RIM ends its quarters one month before Nokia, so RIM has e.g. December “christmas sales” actually reported in the “Q1 sales” of this graph. However, if my 2-year-old would see this, she would probably ask if those lines are the same?
Yes, they have same looks, but how much same? If we are willing to compare these (and we are), we need to scale these equal. I’m now taking the bestselling quarter of RIM (Q1 2011) and reflect everything else as % of that. For Nokia we take Q4 2010 sales and do same. It leads us to:
(EDIT: quarter titles are messed up. They should be Q4 2009 – Q3 2012. Since numbers are correct, I’ll correct titles later.)
Yes and no, they do have same trend (quarterly fluctuations), but RIM is holding to its customer base more tightly. The tipping point is of interest here, both start pretty much from February-March 2011. (Remember that at end of February RIM had sold its entire Q1 2011 sales.) But we know Nokia had lost market share way before unit sales declined. I wonder how RIM (which held its customer base better) did? Q4 2011 RIM sold almost same amount of units as it did in its best quarter, Q1 2011. Their performance sounds like what Nokia would have had if it had kept its Unit sales. So, once again, Market shares:
Both start losing market share at same time. Weirdest thing is the way these two come down. From Q2 2010 onwards – (the time where Nokia has been affected by the strategy change) if we take into account the RIM reporting period – they both take deeper dives and recoveries in same pace. What on earth was happening in the background?!?
Nevertheless, this was just to point out we have “2nd Nokia” in our hands and now it is their time to show us how one can succeed with in-house OS. Or fail with it, whichever happens first. We’ll know better in 9 months.
Most interesting article ! There r a couple of things that need to be pointed out here..
First , the sheer qmount of ignorance about BB10 is astounding ! Tomi , for example , seems to think that BB10 is an incremental upgrade to BB7 ! BB 10 is completely different . Tomi also seems to think that carriers , customers , and enterprise won`t pick it up because it`s an upgrade . Again , wrong !
On the contrary , carriers , enterprise and customers r enthused about BB10 , at least those who have actually tried it ! Indded , the naysayers seem mostly to be people who have either not tried BB10 or people with a interest in influencing Blackberry stocks …
BB10 is every bit the equal of its rivals , superior if u like getting stuff done ! With that and the many positive responses I`ve seen , I think it`s a real contender !
@anon –
Well I guess I should have waited a few hours for my after the release review.
In term of the comparison I’ve always agreed with you that RIM disproves the “Elop effect”. Your marketshare graph does a great job there. In terms of the lag the difference is that RIM had a huge percentage of their customers in enterprise accounts. Enterprise accounts lag in both directions because the implementation and switching costs are high. BES was a huge advantage. I was still a RIM enthusiast in 2010 even though of the 3 major OS / handset combinations available at the time (iOS, Android, BBOS) I thought BBOS was far enough behind to not be worthy of serious consideration for consumer. It wasn’t until March 2012 that Verizon threw in the towel on RIM and announced that they were dropping RIM for Windows Phone as their core strategic OS for enterprise. Though that isn’t going well for them.
As for the flats near end of year with RIM. Remember that RIM is often not being sold with subsidy. Cell phones are on a 7 year depreciation schedule (from 2010 on, 2009 in the graph they were on a 10 year depreciation schedule). If you replace a cell phone with another phone though you can depreciate the entire old phone. So assuming that business flip the phone on a 2 year schedule that’s 70% of the price of the phone (say $500), at a 35% tax that’s over 1/4 of the price of the phone ($125 per employee) to hit balance sheet instantly that otherwise would have been paid in taxes. For government 4Q is often when they deal with deferrable expenses since government also does “use it or lose it” budgeting. That might not all be happening around Christmas but a bit earlier. For example if they are on net-60 they would want to make sure the PO is paid by Dec 31st, not just order placed.
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In terms of applications they are in a slightly better boat. They’ve offered a $10,000 min for application developers. As a developer, once you hit $1000 in sales you get $10k in payments instantly, and then pay that $10k down with sales revenue. That’s why there have 70k apps at launch, though most BB10 apps are poor. Many developers are aiming for the sweet spot of a few thousand in sales. It wouldn’t shock me if given that payoff scheme there is a bit of fraud as well, where developers release a totally crap app and then just purchase it among friends to hit the $1000 min once it becomes clear they aren’t going to hit it by early 2014 when the clock runs out.
Microsoft conversely picked key developers and paid them $60-600k directly. Where the developers would still make money on sales.
@rusty
The BlackBerry the issue isn’t so much the phones as the ecosystem of business services surrounding the phones. BlackBerry before they refocused on the phones had 2400 vertical support projects they were working on, many of which got cut and the staff fired. No one is questioning if something like the Z10 or Q10, even adjusting the hardware down, had come out in 20010 that they would still be on top, and remain on top for years.
But during those 3 years they’ve created deep structural problems. And moreover once they refocused on the phone they allowed the ecosystem to wither. What used to put BlackBerry in a different class was BES. And BES still has some problems. The biggest of which is BES/MVS still isn’t working with the BB10 architecture. Without MVS BlackBerry’s core unified communications infrastructure depends on PBX vendors like Avaya or Mitel to provide the core UC functionality. And there are two effects of that:
a) For a company with only one PBX vendor they can just go with the PBX vendor’s solution and often get a better experience than BlackBerry’s.
b) For a company with multiple vendor’s for PBX BES right now is just a bad version of Microsoft Lync or IBM Sametime.
I have a tough time seeing any use case at all for BlackBerry’s Unified Communications.
Supposedly they fix that sometime in 2013. Now assuming that Microsoft / Nokia keep dawdling with Lync integration then BlackBerry is now ahead.
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As we move out to say 2015 the verticals become important. BlackBerry is still working on fixing their verticals and that’s billions of dollars of work. Right now no one has good vertical support. Microsoft is going to have waves of stuff being ported over because of the desktop switch to Windows 8. A lot of creative interesting vertical mobile stuff is coming out for Apple. MacRuby, by creating a shallower learning curve and higher programmer productivity for Cocoa applications could be a game changer. And BlackBerry has a nice head start plus a huge number of vertical apps to be ported. Finally, Android has far and away the widest most diverse collection of developer tools and middleware but the highest application support cost.
BlackBerry and Google want it. BlackBerry has a viable plan to get it assuming they have the time, I don’t think they do. Nokia doesn’t seem to want it, though I can’t figure out why. Someone like HP, IBM or even Deloitte might move in to take Nokia’s place on Windows Phone and they would want it. Apple has mixed feelings, they have the cash though not the headcount. Ultimately Apple needs growth and moving up the value chain gives them access to locking in high margin accounts.
Its an airball.
OK so here are the realistic numbers now from 2 sources. Prior to rollout BlackBerry had manufacturing capacity for 500k Z10 phone / mo. They are rapidly raising that to 1-2 million. If all goes well they do 20m Z10s for 2013. I think that’s a good reasonably optimistic number I don’t see any reason they shouldn’t be able to sell those, so that’s my estimate for the year for the Z10 under good assumptions. Bad assumptions they have trouble getting production up and more like 15m is the best they can do. So for 2013 BlackBerry is supply constrained not demand constrained. I’d love to know the Q10 capacity is.
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BTW BlackBerry balance originally for Playbook but now for the Z10/Q10 is getting a lot of favorable press today. After the initial “eh” reaction to the Z10, Balance is kicking it as their killer app. And that is rather impressive. Good offers something similar but less sophisticated.
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I did want to throw out something as long as we are discussing business phones for the European readers. How is the European market different? How was Symbian able to be a business phone in Europe without offering the stack of business support that RIM offered/offers?
@CD-Host
Nokia supported the usual suspects regarding email protocols. So people got their email automatically, but maybe not as quickly as with a Blackberry.
There’s also a cultural difference, people in Europe are not as work-obsessed as the Americans. People were proud to remove the battery from their work phone to prevent the boss from nagging them. And being cool in the USA is not automatically a good thing.
That said, RIM did make inroads in Europe. It was popular with the youth because of pinging, and in certain businesses it got lots of traction too.
@Sander –
Thanks. I don’t mean general purpose apps like email but verticals. Like software for home health nurses to help them look up drug interactions. Or software for waste disposal (garbage) to help with rerouting trucks based on how full they are, traffic conditions… Or software for taxi dispatch. Or warehouse management software which tell the workers what to be pulling from where they are in the warehouse.
Or white collar workers… apps to give sales guys mobile CMS software. Or presentation software integrated with a backend CAD system. Or for bankers calculators to price out derivatives based on several ways of breaking it out and up to the second market conditions.
Stuff like that. The tower of verticals.
So very interesting talk from BlackBerry today about their strategy (streamed so at least for now I can’t link). They spent a few minutes talking about Nokia, I figured that might be of interest.
RIM, agrees with your theory that they and Nokia had the same problem. Engineers inside RIM has internally been following Nokia and were very focused on how Nokia was handling their problems and their N8 product line. I have to admit I couldn’t entirely follow this since I’m ignorant about the N8 and this analysis was detailed. Of particular interest to you they even referred to an article from Tomi his, Some Symbian Sanity – why Nokia will not join Google Android or Microsoft Phone 7.
Their view of Nokia’s strategy (and this was in late 2010 not today) was
1) Nokia was in a classic profit death spiral where they having to push through price cuts to maintain their market which pushed them from higher margin customers to lower margin customers. Based on Tomi’s article they believed Nokia was under appreciating the risk. (I do think it is interesting that inside RIM in 2010, Tomi was seen as a semi-official voice of Nokia. I guess he is/was taken that seriously which makes counter blogging worthwhile).
For example RIM was having a falloff in “new subscribers per device sold” (i.e. new business vs. repeat business) from .7 in 2006 (i.e. 70% sales were not replacements) to .4 in 2010, Nokia was experiencing the same sort of drop off with Symbian but seemed unaware of the danger to margins even as they were feeling the effects.
2) In RIM’s opinion the reason they lost was their design process was backwards for the switch from classic smartphones to smartphones as small computers. In the classic smartphone market the designer had picked a list of stuff they wanted the device to do and then picked hardware capable of executing that stuff. What the computer makers (Apple, Google, and the direction WP7 was headed in) had brought to the market was a computer based approach where you started with the best hardware you could get at a price point, and then figured out how to fill that hardware with stuff to do. This alternative approach required much closer cooperation with parts manufacturers, a parts driven approach to phone design. In their opinion this was Apple and Google’s killer feature.
They didn’t use this analogy but this was how the mini computer makers beat the mainframes in the 1970s. The mini computer makers built their computers around the parts, that were available. Their goal was to produce the best possible system given the technology at a particular price point, it did what it did it didn’t target specific functionality like the mainframe manufacturers did. The personal computer companies had picked up this culture from DEC so it was natural to Apple though quite alien to the phone business.
3) They agreed with Nokia’s approach about screen to device ratios and smaller screens. That is the “no home button” approach. They were surprised Nokia had abandoned this design especially as it was core to their smaller / screen approach.
4) They interestingly don’t think Nokia did the right thing in abandoning MeeGo or for that matter Symbian. They thought Symbian foundation was a ridiculous time sink for Nokia. They pointed to foundation as an example of Nokia engaging in business models that conflicted, tying this to some problems with the N8 that I had trouble following.
@CD-Host
That software runs already on WinCE, AFAIK. Could have changed to RIM, but by the time that became feasable RIM was moving out of the picture.
And another thing, there is no European market as such for lots of these kinds of apps. Healthcare (and funding) is different in every country, waste disposal (and funding) is different in each country. Often these are not private businesses looking to maximize profit.
And in Europe Nokia, the biggest device manufacturer, wasn’t very much into doing that kind of vertical stuff. They were happy to sell people devices form making calls, and send the odd text message. The business market was people doing WinCE stuff on ruggedized PDA’s.
@CD-Host
4) RIM weren’t the only people being amazed by Nokia Open Sourcing Symbian. But it was decided at the time that it appeared to world+dog that the smartphone, and smartphone apps, was a bit of a dead-end.
Nokia had been pushing hard at apps for a couple of years, and around 2006-2007-ish the apparently decided it wasn’t going to work. By open sourcing Symbian they told the world that there was little value in the smartphone software stack.
A year later Apple introduced the iPhone and there was suddenly an enormous developer interest. Hence the SDK and the App Store, and smartphone software having some value after all.
@CD-host
“They interestingly don’t think Nokia did the right thing in abandoning MeeGo or for that matter Symbian. They thought Symbian foundation was a ridiculous time sink for Nokia”
Now I’m confused. So they think Nokia did the right thing or they think Nokia did the wrong thing?
Now for all the rest – awesome text. If there will be a link available, please tell me.
And about Nokia: I’m translating to English a long combination of articles from Finnish magazines. It’s about Nokia 2000-2010 and e.g. gives one plausible reason why Nokia apparently dropped app development just a small while before iPhone arrived – N-Gage. The gaming phone was far from success and nobody wanted to buy games to it on memory cards so that caused app development seen as “consumer is not interested”.
@Sander –
WindowsCE! Interesting here Windows CE was seen as a failure and never really caught on with verticals at all. Not to say it wasn’t one among many embedded platforms but it was certainly never a standard for mobility. The general feeling was that WindowsCE didn’t scale down to screens smaller than a paperback book effectively (i.e. tablet sized screen plus keyboard). And once you had tablet screen + keyboard why not just get a cheap laptop and run the real thing.
This does explain a lot though. If Symbian never had a verticals market, even with huge marketshare then I can see why Nokia isn’t grasping the importance. Whole divisions that would need to exist, don’t exist. It is not that they were cut but rather they never existed. To create them for the USA market they would need to create them inside their tiny USA organization.
Well, OK. I now get the problem, but I’d assume there are people inside Nokia who also get the problem. It is not like Elop wouldn’t know this. Adobe / Macromedia have (and authored) quite a few verticals. Juniper has all sorts of cool verticals and I’m sure Elop was a BlackBerry user when he was there using those verticals. And Elop was responsible for the Dynamics group at Microsoft. I wonder if he is focusing away from the USA and doesn’t want to tell Microsoft?
Also if vertical mobile applications don’t exist for the European market at all, that’s a way for Nokia to become bigger than IBM. Heck opportunity isn’t knocking it is pounding on the door
CD: “They interestingly don’t think Nokia did the right thing in abandoning MeeGo or for that matter Symbian. They thought Symbian foundation was a ridiculous time sink for Nokia”
Anon: Now I’m confused. So they think Nokia did the right thing or they think Nokia did the wrong thing?
They thought Nokia did several wrong things (remember this was all discussed in terms of the N8 and I had trouble following so YMMV):
1) Moving off Symbian. They were of the opinion that MeeGo should be seen as an extension of Symbian and pitched as the next version of Symbian. Symbian absorbs MeeGo technologies and morphs into MeeGo. The N8 becomes the N9.
If you think about our conversations (link for lurkers) about what was happening with Qt, this makes sense. It was clear that different groups within Nokia had different visions for how Qt should work. I was strongly siding with the TrollTech faction, i.e. you spend $100m for TrollTech you’ve decided to do it their way. BlackBerry engineers seemed to be siding with the Symbian faction which saw Qt as a replacement system. I continue to think they are wrong, for the reasons I outlined in the earlier thread: Qt was not the right technology for what the Symbian faction wanted to do, wrong tool for the job. But my read is that BlackBerry engineering agreed with Symbian faction and disagreed with the MeeGo approach. That is having Qt become a complete API for Symbian with eventually no access.
2) Creating the Symbian foundation rather than pulling Symbian completely in house. Once Nokia stopped just being a license of Symbian from Symbian but became its owner, it should have been clear that Symbian exists to further Nokia’s strategic interests (sell phones in the short term). Nokia’s attitude towards licenses should have been to meet contractual license requirements for Symbian but the OS is theirs. Symbian Foundation’s natural interests were at odds with Nokia’s natural interests, and ended up distracting Nokia from improving Symbian for their own purposes.
It is not a huge shock that BlackBerry people don’t like the Open Source OS approach given how BlackBerry does things. For them, the N8 used Symbian^3 which was a Nokia only product so what was the point of all this open OS nonsense?
3) Giving up on Symbian / MeeGo and moving to Windows Phone. I assume this only makes sense in the context of Symbian / MeeGo being proprietary to Nokia. Their feeling was the N8 was design which was unique and competitive designed to give Nokia genuine cost advantages relative to Android / Asians.
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Again let me throw in the disclaimer this is from memory from a few minute segment that I only understood 1/2 of.
@CD-Host
There were a couple of people doing things with Symbian, but it was all very local and small scale, from what I could see. I’m sure there should have been people inside Nokia who say the opportunity too, but they did not manage to change things.
By the time Elop became CEO it was of course way too late.
Regarding Qt and Symbian, if MeeGo is to be seen as the next Symbian, this implies seeing Qt as the new API for Symbian. Otherwise you will still end up with two versions of your code, one for MeeGo and one for Symbian. If you have two version, then having a version for iOS instead of MeeGo makes much more sense, which id already did in 2009/2010 (having code for apps selling on iOS, that is).
MeeGo and Symbian had to be as identical as possible at he source level, if you want to leverage the Symbian ecosystem and turning it into a MeeGo ecosystem.
@Sander
By the time Elop became CEO it was of course way too late.
Heck if no one is doing it, it is not too late now. It only becomes too late when there are entrenched vendors in Europe.
Regarding Qt and Symbian, if MeeGo is to be seen as the next Symbian, this implies seeing Qt as the new API for Symbian. Otherwise you will still end up with two versions of your code, one for MeeGo and one for Symbian. If you have two version, then having a version for iOS instead of MeeGo makes much more sense, which id already did in 2009/2010 (having code for apps selling on iOS, that is).
Well they already had that to some extent. Qt/S60 existed. You could write Symbian code in Qt. Yes, absolutely the code had to contain some blocks that called down to the lower level libraries but I think Nokia could have and arguably did offer Qt/S60 as the main API years ago.
@CD-Host
When Elop became CEO, the strategy to replace Symbian with MeeGo was already in place since 2008. Announcing an additional business-orientated vertical on Symbian wouldn’t have worked. Consider, business software replacement cycles can take forever, and the last thing you want is to run your business software on a platform that is obsolete at the time it is announced.
Nokia said that they offered Qt on S60, but in the real world of selling apps to people that didn’t work. Static linking made apps huge and Nokia did not like that because over-the-air delivery was too expensive. Dynamic linking did not work because installing the Qt dynamic libraries was too hard for people.
Earlier, Qt apps leaked memory and could therefore not be Symbian Signed (which means not be sold). And Qt was GPL-led, which means that apps must be GPL-led to be able to use Qt for free.
Later Nokia announced a new UI API on top of Qt but different (and different from the UI API on Maemo at the time). They did everything in their power to make life complicated for the early Qt adopters, or so it appeared.
@Sander –
The BlackBerry discussion had nothing to do with Elop other than they objected to the MeeGo -> Windows move. As for the GPL TrollTech was in the application developer tools business, Nokia wasn’t. So in Jan 2008 when Nokia bought TrollTech, they could and did change the license (to LGPL) which eliminated the problem. BlackBerry in their “keep it proprietary” wouldn’t have advised LGPL but rather some sort of standard platform developer oriented license like the one on Visual Studio.
As far as the Qt libraries, those should have been bundled with the phone / Symbian as an API long before it was official (starting from say 2006/7). For example Apple for the last 15 mo. has bundled the MacRuby API even though MacRuby for iOS isn’t officially supported yet.
As far as the UI API on top of Qt, I agree that was a mess. That’s indicative of the split between the strategy of the Symbian guys and the strategy of the MeeGo/TrollTech guys. Regardless of which faction one agrees with, having Nokia talking out of both sides of its mouth was terrible. Qt was the declared direction of Symbian and Symbian was moving glacially to address this. I don’t know whether Foundation was the problem of if the Symbian guys had had a different design theory and were thwarted and wanted the Qt project to fail.
But whatever it was it certainly wasn’t IMHO healthy.
Just to give some examples of the differences.
In addition to the online training for the new BlackBerry 10. BlackBerry invited me to a day long seminar to meet with other vendors and other system integrators to find out what sorts of services and add ons they offer so that we can cooperative pitch clients.
This is the sort of thing Nokia should be doing.
@CD-Host
Nokia only changed the GPL to LGPL after developers told them that Qt had to be free of that kind Open Source Licensing. They just had not thought about it. One wonders what damage Linux has done to the business edication of Finnish academically schooled software developers.
@Sandervan –
I see you are right that there was a year between when Nokia bought TrollTech and when Nokia LGPLed Qt. TrollTech of course becomes worthless (in the sense of being sellable) once Qt is LGPL. I can see Nokia being reluctant to write their $153m investment down to more or less $0 before they were sure. At least publicly they were pushing Maemo which is GTK+ based. If we assume for the purpose of argument that Nokia was telling the truth we could have a timeline something like this:
– In 2008 they acquire TrollTech with the intention of allowing Symbian development to move to PCs. In other words make mobile applications a source for an explosive vibrant startup software community and attract applications to Symbian via. Qt. So 2008 Qt is being used the way Qt was intended to allow for cross platform applications and they have to add Qt to Symbian at some point in the future. Nokia at this point thinks of themselves as a huge company a $153m investment is no big deal. So at this point Nokia is getting into the development tools business. They might be willing to get a substandard return on that $153m (i.e. lose a little) but they aren’t ready to write that off.
Note this acquisition also buys them access to the LiMo foundation. At the time TrollTech was working with Motorola, Samsung, NTT DoCoMo, NEC, Panasonic, and Vodafone on a different Linux based OS. Nokia had been deliberately excluded and now they had everything.
So in Jan 2008 they still aren’t thinking about MeeGo.
– 2004-2009: Nokia decides on the Maemo project to use GTK+ to create the next generation OS with Linux (i.e. their Android). This is sort of a stripped down version of Gnome. The Gnome community is at this point dominant with the success of Ubuntu. They fail to understand the potential here and treats Nokia like a large contributor but do not let them direct the project. Gnome is far less ready than Nokia suspects.
Nokia’s for some reason doesn’t just fork Gnome. Years are wasted. Android arrives with yet another Linux based mobile OS that actually works in full touch mode. Android starts skyrocketing in success as Nokia’s competitors line up to make devices for it. Nokia starts to panic about their leisurely pace with Maemo and decides to take aggressive action. Maemo and its community based approach is abandoned to work on a touch based system. Products in the pipeline like the N900 are brought out but the direction is abandoned.
– Internally in 2008 they decide to move to a new system (what will be MeeGo). Qt is ahead of GTK+, additionally they outright own TrollTech and can do whatever they want with Qt. No more having to argue with people from RedHat, Sun… about priorities that have nothing to do with mobile. But if Qt is going to be the core API of the new system the development tools can’t be expensive. But without expensive development tools TrollTech’s whole business model is in the crapper.
I would imagine someone inside was considering a Symbian license, i.e. a specific license for Symbian development. But since Symbian was open source that kind of license would pollute Symbian (which remember is OpenSource) so it would require taking Symbian back in house. Also they don’t want to risk a fork of Qt and the distraction so they LGPL Qt which gives them far and away the best widget set in the mobile industry and genuine developer enthusiasm for the first time in many years.
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Nokia was a such a strong consistent advocate of Open Source. I think it was a huge service to humanity that they were, but from a business standpoint their joint development ideology was (and I would argue in the Windows space still is) a huge hinderance to their success.
What I don’t understanding yet is Nokia’s strategy around 2004. Here is what I’m thinking. Nokia became a huge proponent of joint / cooperative development during the 1990s. Their heavy FRAND licensing from the 1990s allowed them to pull well ahead of other companies that were more reluctant and Nokia became a technology powerhouse. When Nokia started embracing Open Source it might have felt like cooperation and FRAND just taken a step further. And they might have been right had the USA not suddenly come on board with totally alternative business models that were very hostile to slow, careful and deliberate decision making.
But I’d like to fill in some more details. Like why for example they didn’t fork Gnome instead of dealing with the BS from the Gnome community. Did they really think they would have a decade to bring out Maemo?
I attended the BlackBerry Experience in New York today. A few comments:
1) The first thing is they opened the forum with an acknowledgement that they had tested everyone’s patience and stopped listening. I’m sure that was very good to hear.
2) They did a nice job presenting 3 tracks:
A business track
An IT administrator track
A developer track
3) I heard a lot of negative feedback from developers who had played with their SDKs as it still being too hard to configure, particularly the simulator. One of the things that Tomi often doesn’t discuss is the advantage of having Visual Studio as the developer environment for Nokia, which puts them ahead of iOS’ XCode rather than fighting it out with hard to use tools. Obviously BlackBerry is going to fix the problems with their SDKs over the next few months but that’s yet another thing they have to do.
4) Their strategy is very clear and they are executing on it. A focus on: Good devices, Unified Communications, Security, Device Management and enhancing the application space. Everyone from BlackBerry and the partners are unified around those goals. Nokia could really learn a lot about how to do strategy from BlackBerry.
5) In terms of security and MDM they are starting to pitch something interesting. 2 way security:
a) Keeping data secure
b) Allowing employees security from employers. Balance really is aiming for balance in MDM. In companies that use MDM I can this making a huge
6) They showed some new stuff
a) BlackBerry is now FIPA 140-2 (government security standard) validated. That’s a unique differentiator that will make a huge difference for defense and may do quite a bit for selling to and keeping financials.
b) A focus on Universal Device Service, using BES to manage iOS and Android devices
c) Time shift and some other cool camera features — I suspect there are apps for most of this for other platforms.
d) Remember which is sort of a built in Evernote