Positive Signs at #BBWC and #BB10Jam Bode Well for RIM
This past week I attended the BlackBerry World Conference (BBWC) and BlackBerry 10 Jam (BB10Jam) in Orlando. It’s the 7th or 8th BBWC I’ve been to (previously called the Wireless Enterprise Symposium) but the 1st BB10Jam (… since there’s only been one). I’ve been to each of the 4 (?) BlackBerry Developer Conferences that have been held in America (RIM also holds them in Europe and Asia). Basically, I’ve been to a lot of RIM events. Each year it’s interesting to see how attendees and the media are reacting to RIM announcements.
Last year at BBWC, the PlayBook was the focus (and all attendees got one). While people didn’t really know what to think about the PlayBook, the whole non-iPad tablet market was still an experiment and most people at the show were giving RIM the benefit of the doubt. It was, however, the start of the summer of confusion about the direction RIM was going with smartphones and their next BlackBerry OS. So while the mood was generally positive, there was an undertone of worry about the future.
Since the conferences are RIM events, most attendees are almost always pretty positive about RIM and BlackBerry (if you weren’t, why would you attend unless you are media looking for a story?). However the Fall 2011 BB Dev Con in San Francisco was a notable exception. After a rough summer at RIM with a LOT of personnel changes that directly impacted developers, It was a quiet, almost dead BB Dev Con in the Fall. It was not well attended and those that did come were not sure what to make of the “new” RIM they were being exposed to. Most developers were talking about hedging their bets on other platforms in case RIM was unable to recover.
In the past 6 months since that somber event, there have been a lot of changes at RIM. The developer relations team, mandate and direction has been overhauled (or at least the overhaul has progressed a lot further than it had by then). While I dearly miss meeting up with many of the people who have left the team, there’s no denying that the latitude the current team has to make a direct, positive impact on developers has made a big difference. The most visible (or more accurately, audible) difference now is that uttering the words “Apple” and “iOS” is no longer a fireable offense by a RIM employee. Seriously. In past years it seemed like there were meetings with every RIM employee attending an event in which they were threatened with life or limb should those words pass through their lips. The effect was the appearance of either mis-placed arrogance or fear.
This year, RIM reached out to developers well in advance of the unveiling of the BlackBerry 10 OS to the world. They had developers using a beta of the next NDK in the Spring, they had some developers building demos on the new platform, and they had hardware available to let people play with it themselves during and after the conference. The result was a confident attitude by RIM employees as they knew when they made claims about the ease of developing for the platform that they had developers available to back it up. And they had enough developers on hand who had already played with the platform to re-confirm the message. I can’t count the number of developers who told me the porting time of their C/C++ apps was a couple of days or who were pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get up and developing on BB10 (in fact, I don’t recall anyone saying it was hard…). This produced a vibe of cautious optimism from attendees with a “this is better than I expected” attitude by the end of it.
By seeding developers with Alpha devices, RIM is pretty much guaranteeing they will have a load of content available when the device launches (I already hear that a lot of PlayBook apps take minimal or no work to get running on the device). But of course, the device launching is the key. RIM has not revealed a launch window yet but they typically launch major new devices between end-Aug and Oct (Bold, Pearl, Storm, Torch) in order to be on the market well before Christmas. If RIM is able to reveal a few more interesting surprises on the UI/feature list (they have some interesting ones in store to be revealed later) they could have a strong debut — which, long-term, is really what will keep developers’ interest and positive attitudes moving forward.
Related articles
- Bacon Bits: dispatches from BlackBerry World (untether.tv)
- RIM CEO talks about BlackBerry 10, challenges (intomobile.com)
- RIM’s new BlackBerry: What developers think of the prototype (thestar.com)
- BlackBerry 10: What you’re saying (intomobile.com)
If you were running a company making, literally, billions of dollars in net income, increasing revenue by over 30% annually, and generally being praised by everyone as a major success story, and I told you that you had to completely change what you were doing because it was all going to come crashing down in two short years, what would you say? After you stopped laughing (and while seeing me out of your office) you’d probably re-assure me that the company was in good hands, you were always planning for the future and that your core business was rock solid so I should not worry. Your technology was the best, your customers were happy, and there was no need to take dramatic action when life was so good. But amazingly, RIM’s executives did just that.
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