Friday, December 16, 2011

RIM needs a miracle

So
o... I seem to be writing an aweful lot about RIM, which is not what I had intended to do on this blog... but I can't help it, there is just so much news about it and I am sad to see them in their current state. I have worked with RIM so long and can hardly remember when I didn't have a Blackberry in my hand, I really do wish I could be writing with excitement rather than frustratio.
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So not too long after I had made my declaration of the RIM deathwatch, we get an earnings report from the company. Which includes:


  • nkA significant decline in revenue
  • Official delay on the first Blackberry 10 phones until the latter half of 2012
  • co-CEOs now working on a $1 a year salary
  • Assurances that they will beN turning RIM around once the new smartphones are released.ke 
Essentially things we already knew or expected regarding the decline in revenue and everything else we expected to hear with missed targets and more assurrances.

I am not even sure where to start with this because there really is no hope. Sooner or later all the RIM investors are going to be clamoring for Mike & Jim's heads on a pike and someone to get in there and give them value for their investments. Given that the QNX OS is  not even close to being mature that would lead me to believe we will inevitably see either a split in the company or the sale of it or it's patents.

I am flabbergasted... How can a company with the mountain of mistakes that have been made retain the same structure? Does anyone at all give 2 cents about the fact that the co-CEOs are going to be making $1 a year? The savings are peanuts in comparisons to the money that RIM will be bleeding in the next year or two. Also... does a $1 per year salary make the CEO's any less dilusional (since they will probably make it up in stock)? 

Speaking of delusional, why would anyone think that ramping up spending on marketing the Blackberry 7 platform is a good idea or would even change perception? Does anyone have faith that this will change anything at all? People need an ecosystem and a decent phone experience, I hardly believe that there is a phone store in the world that would be pushing Blackberry phones these days, particularily because of the requirement to lock people into 3 year data contracts. They don't have a plan, that much is obvious from the delays that they keep announcing, particularly the delay to the native e-mail for the Playbook... how hard is that? Everyone has lost faith in you RIM, you need to admit that there is something wrong and do something about it.

I don't think anyone can believe anymore that you can turn it around. You had a good opportunity to build the official iPad competitor, you were in at the right time with the right hardware but with no software or integrated experience. You could have stood a chance and shown the world how good QNX can be, but you rushed it to market as an incomplete product and blew it. Now there is far too much pressure on you to bring your saviour phone to market and when it does come to market, it will be too late. You haven't fixed Playbook, so what should make us think that you are going to have a capable phone with the same OS? The OS is immature and there is not enough time to catch up to the likes of iOS and Android. This next phone will be your make it or break it phone... if you want to stand a chance make sure it is 'actually' ready, just as good as the old ones, but on even footing with all the new smartphones. Anything less will be the last nail in your coffin, as sorry as I am to say that.

Monday, December 12, 2011

Ad-Hoc Networking with an ASUS eeePad Transformer

I have been spending quite a bit of time trying to connect by eeePad at work so that I can use for a few odd things, but had never been successful setting it up due to the lack of Ad-Hoc support present in the Android OS. But today, this changed! I am happy to say that I am now connecting to the WiFi of my work computer and piggybacking on it's connection.

So now for a bit of history (skip to setup if you want to get down to the nitty gritty). So initially when I purchased my eeePad, and as you may know if you read my first post about the eeePad that I was having a great time using it everywhere but work. I tried Ubuntu and the Windows 7 ad-hoc networking, but all with to no avail, I had actually given up. It wasn't until I tried Linux Mint 12 where they made it a bit easier to create a hotspot that I could actually connect. I am not sure what the details are around the hotspot itself, the functionality left as quickly as it came as it became tricky to connect to my home connection and I had some how messed the connection up.

Anyway... I have since been searching the net trying to find out how other people had been trying to connect their android devices to their machines and for the most part, they consisted of the following:

I did not get very far trying to modify the configuration file for the WiFi, nor did I feel like rooting my eeePad (I will someday, just no reason right now because it is doing what I want) so I gave up on the more complex solutions. I decided that I would switch back over to my Windows 7 Professional 64-bit hard disk and give Connectify and Virtual Router a shot.

Connectify:

It did not work well for me, as a matter of fact on my system it actually completely wrecked my ability to connect to any network (both wired and wireless). I don't think it is Connectify's fault, I am sure I had this working at some other point in time, but this time was a bust. I had to do a system restore to get the system back and running as an uninstall still left me without the ability to connect to a network and I had no time to figure out why.

Virtual Router:

This is the one that worked very well for me at the end of the day and I just used it as we speak to pick up some of those nice $0.10 applications from the Market Place while I type away at this post.

The application is just as easy to setup as Connectify was, perhaps more so, but the added bonus to this software is that it is free and it lets you alter your SSID as well as connect into your system over WPA2 rather than the WEP you are typically stuck with when you setup an ad-hoc network.

So to get this setup, you just run through the installer and let it install it's service. At the end of the installation you should have a 'VirtualRouterService'. Once the install completes, fire up the Virtual Router software, you should get a screen that looks like this:


Just place your SSID and password in the appropriate fields (you can clearly see I have been playing with WEP) and ensure that your shared connection is whatever your wired ethernet is. Once you have all that setup it is as simple as clicking 'Start Virtual Router'.

Once your virtual router has started up, you should see most of the fields grey out and the button should change from 'Start Virtual Router' to 'Stop Virtual Router'. You should also see when clicking on your networks in Windows 7 the name of your SSID just below your network connection that has internet access:


You should now be able to connect your Android device to this connection using DHCP. Once your device is connected, you should see this in the Virtual Router window:

You should have no problems now connecting to the internet with your phone/tablet. If you do happen to run into the 'Virtual Router Could Not Be Started', try disabling the IPv6 functionality for each network adapter by unchecking the box and restart your computer and try again.


This seemed to correct the issue for me and made that error go away.

Here are some of the other links that I had followed to troubleshoot the error:

  • Virtual Router Could Not Be Started Discussion: Lists some command line tricks you can do with netsh. I admit that I did use the command  'netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=Test key=YOUR PASSWORD GOES HERE'. But the command should only create the ad-hoc network you would get going through the networking wizard.
  • Updated my WiFi drivers.
  • Removed all previous ad-hoc networks I had created.
  • Restarted more than once.




Thursday, December 8, 2011

RIM Deathwatch

I didn't really want to make a complete post out of this, but reading through an article that Paul Thurrott had created got me thinking again how horribly doomed RIM is, especially now that they have reaffirmed their committment to the Blackberry Playbook. It's not that I don't like the Playbook, I think it is a fine tablet, I would actually buy it if it:

  1. Weren't still $499 for a 16GB model up here in Canada
  2. Was not 7", that's too small for me.
  3. Wasn't made by a company that seemingly has no direction.
But considering how they are fairing currently, I can't help but think of the parallels between RIM and HP because it is almost as if they were both faced with the same choices and HP is the only one that made the right decision.

So you have HP who under Leo Apotheker who was committed to their mobile platform (WebOS) and spending quite a bit of money trying to build and market the HP Touchpad. It appears that he really did believe in the product, it's just to bad that the board didn't and felt that HP had veered off into many different directions and was not delivering on it's core products/services. This of course resulted in a new CEO and a company direction that essentially dismisses the HP Touchpad as a distraction with a fire sale on HP Touchpad inventory ($99 per device) which no doubt incurred a huge loss on each device. The decision was a surprise to everyone (especially considering they had spent so much money on ads with Russell Brand), but it is a decision that in the end that made sense. They have stopped bleeding cash an refocused the company on things that it actually should have been looking at.

Then you have RIM, the co-CEOs and the Playbook. They are guilty of the the same thing that Leo Apotheker was, which was basically to drop everything else and focus most R&D efforts into a tablet in order to compete with the iPad. This is very clear with their feeble attempt to try and market their new Blackberry OS, OS7 which is essentially a service pack for OS6 and their release of 'slightly' updated Bold and Torch devices running this OS. The big difference between HP and RIM is that there is no one on the board that can do anything to change the RIM as Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis are not only co-CEOs, they are also co-chairs of the board. So change in the company is very unlikely or you would have seen a new CEO by now or the abandonment of the Blackberry Playbook. RIM should have followed HP's lead and ditched the Playbook so it could take all of the money spent on R&D and use it to bring their first superphone to market.

It is really hard to be optimistic for RIM in light of these mis-steps:

  • Announced Playbook 2.0 Delay: Which will most likely consist of some minor tweaks to the OS and a native e-mail, calendar and contact applications and NO Blackberry Messenger.  But to continue to have a devices with no native applications and depend totally on Android, Blackberry and Web applications does not look good. Who would pay $499 or should I say $199 for a device that does not have native e-mail, calendar, contact and other apps? And that is leaving selection of other applications completely out of the equation.
  • Announced Blackberry Mobile Fusion: Which makes no sense to anyone. The stronghold has been traditionally the enterprise and the securability of Blackberry devices. The trend right now is to BYOD (Bring your own device) and if you could not secure them in anyway, the Blackberry would be the device of choice, at least for a little while longer. Mobile Fusion now allows enterprise IT the ability to secure competing devices alongside Blackberries and while it may not be 'as good' as a Blackberry I am sure that most enterprises will find it to be 'good enough'. If this software is ever released, the market share that Blackberry devices hold currently will plummit. But hey, they will be a leader in securing devices in the enterprise... there's always that.
  • Announced a profit warning: They announced the profit warning on Dec 6th, which has everything to do with the recent price cuts to the Blackberry Playbook to reduce stock has some financial analysts slashing their price targets to as low as $10/share. The targets in general for the stock are trending downward and it seems that all the financial analysts agree with my opinion of the company currently.
  • Drunken RIM Executives causing trouble on Beijing bound flight: This has nothing to do with their business problems, but certainly does not help promote it's image. The stunt resulted in a delayed flight for all passengers on board and a $71,000 fine for the executives.
  • The 'Dingleberry' jail break for the Playbook: Not that jailbreaking is bad, but this certainly takes away from their reputation for having a 'secure' device. Developers have found what they deemed to be a 'Mack Truck sized' hole in the security of the devices that allowed them to 'root' the Playbook to obtain additional functionality. RIM just patched the flaw on Dec 6th, and the developers had a remedy to the patch available within hours of the release. 
  • Announced the next version of Blackberry OS to be BBX without checking for trademark infringement: Not that this is a terrible thing, because it isn't. But you would think that a company that is trying to revitalize the OS and that is spending money on advertising the next version of their mobile OS would check to be sure that they could actually use the name. Now they jump from Blackberry OS7 to Blackberry OS10... what happened to the other 2 versions (OS8/9)? You know people are going to ask. This is more of an embarassment than anything, but it is just another piece of bad news to throw on the pile.
What I think we need here is a 'Steve Jobs' for RIM. Someone with vision to walk into the doors of RIM and make the right decisions to revive this dying brand. Unfortunately as previously mentioned, this would be virtually impossible to achieve the way the company and it's board are structured.


Here is an interesting Forbes.com article that asks all the questions that I would ask to Jim Balsillie and then some. It also showcases what appears to be either their 'default' corporate speak they use constantly to reassure or their actual delusional beliefs.