Critical Brain Candy

Last night’s earnings report from RIM brought more bad news, even prompting BGR into a sensationalist headline of Research In Motion is dead.

The comments in response to the BGR article are interesting to read, most tending towards a sentiment of “Why are you saying this, don’t you know you’re affecting real peoples lives?”  I think those commenters are missing an important part of this whole situation: the media isn’t what’s causing problems for RIM, it’s the company.  Sure, media can affect public sentiment, which could make some people less likely to purchase that brand, but I’m sure that’s the smaller of RIMs problems at this point.

Build a product that people want to buy, and they’ll buy it.  Period.

The media is reporting, and opining, on what they see going on.  I think their reporting has shown frustration with how long RIMs problems have been obvious, and little was done to fix them, just like the average person is frustrated.  The fact that RIM is declining fast is indisputable, look at any corporate metric you like: profit, revenue, sales, customer satisfaction, etc.

But, I think calling RIM dead is inaccurate.  The RIM we know today is almost certainly dead, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other opportunities for them.

Over the last few years, after it became abundantly clear the current BlackBerry OS was obsolete, I came to the opinion that RIM should take Android, layer all their enterprise security stuff on top of it, and move on.  That would get RIM a modern OS, access to a modern selection of Apps (the most important part of a platform, in my opinion), and still maintain their value-add proposition.  They went with QNX instead, and I do have to say I enjoy using it on the Playbook.  It’s definitely slicker than Android, although not iOS.  The killer is still the weaker app store, but time will tell how it grows.

One of the articles today did interestingly point out that a switch to Windows Phone could be the best bet for RIM.  What if RIM became the premier back-end integration service for Windows Phone with better Exchange integration, BBM, enterprise management, etc, while at the same time producing hardware for it.  This might be attractive enough for Microsoft to consider an acquisition or partnership, and a win for RIM because they get an automatic user base and a powerhouse like Microsoft marketing the OS.

Food for thought.

There’s a new list of  Top 10 Easy Ideas For A Sustainable 2012 over at YouSustain.  This years list seems extra informative because of the ability to show what the CO2 amounts discussed actually mean, via links to the new tool How Much CO2 Is That?

Let me know of any comments or ideas for other things to add to future lists.  Plus, if you like it, please share it with your friends!

The last few weeks have seemed eerily similar to the build-up towards war with Iraq.  First you have the pundits flooding the media with talk of how war is inevitable, then eventually the political leaders follow.  At least it sounds like there’s a reasonable adult at the helm: ‘This is not a game’: Obama blasts ‘casual’ talk of war with Iran.

Last week, in the build up towards the Israeli Prime Ministers visit to Washington, a lot of media focused on how Netanyahu had the upper hand and was going to be able to force Obama into action.  I find this particularly disturbing; a country that relies heavily on the US for its defense wants to strong-arm them into war?

I agree it’s not good for anyone if Iran builds nuclear weapons, but then again it’s not good if anyone has them.  A conventional war with Iran definitely wouldn’t be good either.