Buckle in for barely informed punditry! Yesterday’s RIM AGM did little to inspire confidence in me, or apparently, investors in general [disclosure: I hold a small amount of RIM]. Balsillie and Lazaridis are still singing the same song (great things coming!) when RIM needs to be engaged in wholesale change. I’m not going to get into “why” RIM needs to change (which should be abundantly obvious), but “what” – so here it is:
1. Product Lineup: Go down to two phones. RIM has 6 BlackBerry phones in its lineup today, and announced yesterday that there would be 7 new handsets before the end of the year. Can you tell me the difference between a Curve and a Bold? Or the recently canned Tour? Or why the Storm 2 still exists after the release of the Torch? Have you even heard of or ever seen a “BlackBerry Style?”
You know what RIM’s product strategy is? A knock off of General Motor’s pre-bankruptcy badge-engineering schemes. You could buy the same crappy minivan as a Saturn Relay, a Pontiac Montana, a Chevy Uplander, or a Buick Terraza. Why? Who knows! Post-bankruptcy GM got a clue and so should RIM: products need value & differentiation.
So, how about this: Have two phones – one business oriented, once consumer oriented, and execute really, really well on both. Right now RIM’s design, engineering, and marketing efforts are spread too thin across too many products. Why do you think Apple executes so well on design and messaging? Because they’ve got one product and can put resources behind it.
2. Developer Ecosystem: Stop proliferating OS’s and models. To develop on iPhone, you need one development kit and one version of your app to reach a huge base of users. The BlackBerry equivalent is a nightmare: Multiple OS’s, multiple OS versions, multiple hardware setups with different screen sizes and formats – to get any kind of coverage, your BlackBerry development effort is going to be 5x the cost of the iPhone equivalent. And that’s without getting into the new models and OS’s in the pipeline.
RIM needs a single platform, a single hardware spec, and a concerted developer outreach program. Apps & developers create the virtuous cycle the drives adoption, customer retention, and ongoing app store purchases. Going down to two phones from 6 or 7 would help. The big challenge though is getting all of the current, old, weird (the “style”) handsets out of circulation. RIM needs to do some strategic accounting and figure out to a giant incentive program to drive upgrades can be capitalized & amortized as a product cost.
3. Product Development Cycle: Speed it up. The Bold first came out in 2008. It looks and works more or less the same today, three years later. The most recent tweak it to make it “touchscreen” – which will take the same dated form factor and mediocre functionality deep into 2012. That’s a 4+ year run: that’s sounds more like a car than a phone. Handset churn is 50% per year – and people always want something new. That’s why HTC, Motorola, Samsung, and Apple have a launch or significant upgrade (roughly) every six months. RIM has freshened up the curtains periodically, but their product line is pretty stagnant.
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RIM has the resources and customers get back on top; all they need is some bold leadership that’s willing to put forward a real vision and get behind it.
