RIM’s Year of Misery

December 17, 2011 by Yuval Brisker

I loved BlackBerry.

Without BB, TOA would probably not be here. I know that’s a big statement but it’s really not far from the truth.

When Irad and I started TOA, we were immediately going after large corporate customers. We wanted to make them feel like we were big. We wanted to make them feel like we were there for them any time, any where – always available and accessible. “Always available” in 2004 was not a given. And being available AND being completely mobile at the same time (meaning travelling all over the country and the world to meet prospects and customers and getting our email with no problem) – considering there was barely a mobile internet (GPRS – not even EDGE – and definitely no 3G) and very little WiFi – these were almost mutually exclusive concepts.

When we realized the possibilities that BB offered – i.e. email and IM anywhere – we were blown away and quickly adopted it as our platform of choice.

Our first BB didn’t have a phone yet – so we still carried around a cheap Nokia for voice – but it made us seem instantly bigger than we were and we were in business!!! Using BlackBerry Internet Server to get our mail anywhere, using BB Messenger to connect with each other and our growing employee base – we were big even when we were small. And then we extended that to use BB to launch our first web-based mobility app; our people found many innovative ways to run and manage various technological aspects of our business using the BB platform…we were totally enamored by the power and the vision and, well, the rest is history…

So it is with much sadness that I look at the train wreck that is RIM today. Not only because our own evolution is intimately tied to BB, but because the whole history of web-based mobile business computing is intimately tied to RIM.

I am trying to understand the lessons learned: how it happened that they were riding SO high only 3 years ago and now they have fallen SO low: BlackBerry’s share of the smartphone market has dropped from 49 percent in 2009 to 10 percent (!!!) in 2011. What brought about such a decline iPhone and Android, of course, are the first reasons), but what were the other red-flags along the way? What were the decisions taken or not taken, the fault points not heeded? What were/are the lesson to be learned for business and technology leaders. Clearly a massive business case study and probably a few PhDs to be written on this.

To me, the biggest single miss on RIMs part was not seeing that even for hardcore business people, the iPhone was not just about a beautifully designed and executed device and OS, but that it was that they smartphone no longer was just about secure and guaranteed email. It was being blind to the fact that the smartphone was no longer just a mobile email device – but a fully versatile platform that merged every aspect of a users life – both business AND personal, both hardcore emailing and IM AND casual information gathering/browsing, gaming and social networking. That the business person was also a consumer a regular guy or gal. By not ever developing a truly usable fast rendering browser, not finding a way to incorporate a big enough and effective touch screen as well as a robust app network – these were the ultimate killers.

I recently decided to give RIM one last chance (it wasn’t just sentiment – I truly LIKE my physical keyboard) – so I changed my Bold 9700 for the new Bold 9900 with the goal of testing it out before I test the iPhone 4S and the new Samsung Galaxy Nexus to find out which of these is going to be my new preferred device. Well, so far, though the new Bold 9900 has some very good new features related to emailing and contacts (BB’s strength), it does not rank in terms of browsing and apps and it’s touch screen and OS are definitely behind in terms of usability. So I am probably going to move beyond BlackBerry and close a chapter on my own smartphone computing history and symbolically on Blackberry and RIM.

Update:

Another article in the nytimes about Blackberry and RIM. It just keeps coming.

Amazon Fire: Not Perfect

December 13, 2011 by Yuval Brisker

There was a lot of negative buzz in press over the past few days about the Kindle Fire and now that buzz has turned into scorching criticism. Jakob Nielsen, one of the world’s foremost experts on usability, issued an alert saying that “Kindle Fire…suffers from plain old bad UI design in many areas” and “a disappointingly poor user experience”.

The NYTimes prominently covered the issues saying that Amazon is having some real challenges with the Fire in an article that went straight to the number one spot on the Times’ Most Emailed List. In it, the Times cautioned all the naysayers not to count Amazon out, but nonetheless described the problems in detail and raised red flags for consumers.

We should not forget that while there was plenty of criticism of the iPhone when it came out (remember no ‘copy/paste’?) or the iPad (‘who needs it…’) it was first to market; and the sheer wonder of the new was enough to help people over the hump.

The Kindle Fire competes with the iPad, despite Amazon’s insistence that it doesn’t…I personally can’t see myself owing the Fire AND an iPad AND a Kindle eReader….I will choose one eReader and one tablet. And though Fire might be cheaper…given that it is not functionally on par with the iPad…I choose the iPad as my tablet.

Amazon, an inspiring company on many many levels, should have made sure that its product was perfect. It didn’t and the Fire’s future is not clear.

And here’s an update to this blog…a followup article in the NY Times.

Android is a Massive Force

October 17, 2011 by Yuval Brisker

Interesting article in ZDNet about the advance of the Android Army. It’s pretty amazing!

HTML 5 Continues to Impress & TOA leads the way!

August 14, 2011 by Yuval Brisker

With the addition this week of the new Kindle HTML5 application, which allows amazon kindle users to access their full library of books from every HTML5-enabled browser (online AND offline) – it’s clear that the HTML5 revolution is in full swing. And those in the know are both impressed and supportive.

Being a natively cloud-based SaaS company – TOA is totally there:

On the back of our most fundamental founding principle – NO INSTALLED APP – we have  embraced HTML5 in its totality in order to provide deep enhanced mobility to our customers worldwide. ETAdirect HTML5 Mobility  (Called H5M) is a nothing short of spectacular – with the beautiful look, feel and a robust depth of functionality of a downloaded installed app but totally in the browser. TOA’s engineers have pushed the envelope on what HTML5 can do and provide our customers to the absolute limits…and beyond…Some things we can talk about  (and some we absolutely can’t – being that they are huge innovations and everyone would LOVE to know what they are…). But we can revel in things like signature and document capture, document storage and manipulation which are just a few of the cool capabilities that this next generation markup language affords us and we can extend to our customers.

In TOA Tech’s ETAdirect H5Mobility we are definitely charting new territory, even for HTML5, with a groundbreaking offline persistence capability that will not only allow users to access all the relevant time sensitive information when the user is offline in an area where there is no coverage, but  TOA’s engineers have taken it one huge step beyond just ‘plain’ offline –  they have made the application data available to the user even if the browser and the device crashes!!! The user can reboot, log into ETAdirect and have all his information restored in the ETAdirect browser app to where he was pre-crash – all without having any access to the Internet. Now that is one of the huge feats that makes the ETAdirect H5Mobility app the most powerful and versatile app on the market today.