Why RIM are in Trouble

Nokia were the phone company to beat. They made the best phones, and then they made a terrible mistake, one that I think RIM has made and is still in the process of making: they kept making the same phone while other companies innovated. Nokia produced the same phone over and over again, with a slightly different feature set each time, but without any real advancement. They might add a radio, take away the radio and bluetooth, add a camera, changeable covers, and on and on, but basically the same phone each time, and not features that were game changing. Their competitors, such as RIM, did something else: they came up with better input methods, full/half qwerty keypads; better screens, better operating systems.

Now RIM is going the way of Nokia. It feels like they are trying to keep everything that is unique to them and add a tiny fraction of what is making their competitors so successful. Before that's all you had to do, you added a single new feature that your competitors didn't have and you had the new golden-phone. The problem for RIM is their competitors have been doing this for a while and RIM has been making the same phone over and over again. Only the quality of their phones has also dropped.

I had a Pearl 8100 (the original Pearl) it was my first Blackberry, and it convinced me that RIM was the way to go. It was beautiful, it was small, with a crisp screen and a great OS. I got e-mail and internet everywhere I went. I convinced my girlfriend and my brother they needed this to live. I was an evangelist for the company telling everyone how fantastic it was and they should change to RIM. That all changed a few months back.

I moved to a Pearl Flip. I still love that phone. It should have gotten OS 5.0 on it, it was on the list of devices that would get it, and then recently it mysteriously vanished off that list. But that's not my main issue; my girlfriend got a Pearl too, the 8110, a slightly newer version of my Pearl at the time. It started to have problems, and it never stopped having them. When it started I was still convinced of RIM being the second coming so I knew that they would fix this, and it would all be fine.

The phone has been repaired and replaced several times. The data stops working, the data works but e-mails don't, the trackball stops working, the phone turns itself on and off. It has been nothing but trouble. I went on the official RIM forums and brought my complaint to the company. I said a lot of what I've said here. I had made sales for RIM, I had brought them new customers on a platter and this is how they were being treated. I would be jumping ship, and I would not be recommending the company again, I would recommend competitors products.

The response was not what I expected, I expected at the very least a "we're sorry this has happened, have a sticker". Instead I got abuse, and mocked for leaving a growing company, one that would inevitably be bigger than Jesus had been, or words to that effect. In fairness, it's a forum, these were other users and I sincerely hope none of them were RIM employees, but still it did not exactly convince me of the error of my ways and make me repent at the feet of the mighty RIM.

I moved to a Nexus One a few months back, I brought over one of the people I had convinced to move to RIM. I will find all the others I converted to worship at the altar of RIM and show them the next phone-god has a much better altar. The King is dead, long live the King!