Operating Systems, Apple & the future of mobile
June 17th, 2011, 12:30am by JakeKelvin & I were chatting on Twitter about RIM and it’s inevitable, even if long overdue, decline. I made the point that Nokia & RIM should’ve been fighting over Palm in January 2009 when webOS was introduced instead of trying to put lipstick on their OS pigs. Kelvin made the point that owning your own OS seems to be doom in the long run with the notable exception of Apple. Of course, there have been many in-house operating systems that enjoyed a decade of success or more– Sun’s Solaris, Palm’s OS, Nokia Symbian (even if nominally not Nokia’s), RIM of course and the aforementioned Apple with now 4 distinct OSes (Apple II, MacOS, OS X and iOS). Looking back through 40 years of operating systems, there are some trends that appear– a new operating system arises that changes the game, then slowly loses its lead. The companies seem be acquired at bargain prices (Sun, Silicon Graphics, Commodore, Palm) or completely reboot their OS. Apple has now made 2 OS transitions, just as the previous generation was running out of steam. Microsoft effectively tacked on Windows 3.1 & 95 onto the DOS core but eventually built Windows NT from scratch and have moved from that base through Windows 7. Ditto the WinMo to WinPho transition.
Palm tried the move to webOS, it didn’t take. And RIM has made a far-too-late move by adopting QNX, a decent kernel that will probably be two years before it matches webOS/iOS circa 2009. As Kelvin points out, when it’s your OS, you’re blind to its flaws. Microsoft has made the transition because they got feedback from customers. Everyone seems to make the move 2-3 years late– Nokia & RIM are probably the most egregious examples. As anyone that used OS 9, WinME, or a Treo 700p can attest. Of course, much of these obliterations can be laid at the feet of GNU/Linux, which ran roughshod over the Unix server industry and now, in the form of Android, is decimating the last generation (and some of the this generation) mobile OSes. Maybe this pattern explains why Google is developing Chrome alongside Android– by the time Android becomes dated and limited by its own architecture, Chrome will step into the void. Now given the anemic track record of Linux on the desktop, that might not be much of a fear. But who knows.
June 19th, 2011 at 2:13 am
First of all, I’m really not sure what the problem was with RIMM’s earnings… They sold 13 million devices at 43% gross margin. That’s pretty good in comparison with most of their other competitors, like HP. No one would be complaining if they were getting better traction with the Playbook– obviously, RIMM is trying for a soft landing with their legacy OS while they are getting their next gen platform ready.
Anyway, here’s the danger when you own your own OS. Someone else eventually comes out with something cool, and your response goes through the following stages:
1) It’s not so great and we are doing fine so we’ll ignore it.
2) We can match those features by bolting them on top of the OS that users still know and love
3) We can write a new better OS from scratch and we’re the ones to do it because we wrote our previous OS and wasn’t that great?
MS and RIM got caught with their pants down on a touch interface and spent too long in stages 1 and 2 and are now stuck in 3. I might even argue that Apple is in stage 2 in responding to the Android invasion by adding multitasking and notifications to an OS that wasn’t designed for it.
Contrast that with HTC, who sees new OSs as opportunities. Low margin business, but at least they will never go down with the ship…
June 21st, 2011 at 6:19 pm
RIM is about to discover that they don’t have the same leverage over carriers that may have once enjoyed. If ever there’s been a time when AT&T, Verizon , Sprint & T-Mob are fine leaving RIM’s take it or leave it offer, it’s now.
http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2011/06/20/rim-pressures-carriers-to-approve-blackberry-phones-no-matter-what-with-bugs-and-problems/
June 21st, 2011 at 7:22 pm
Any leverage they ever had comes from enterprise customers demand. Sure, a lot of companies allow alternatives now, but there are whole industries that are still requiring blackberry and that will keep the pressure on carriers.
June 21st, 2011 at 8:20 pm
Are enterprise customers really demanding the latest Blackberry models?
June 22nd, 2011 at 2:07 pm
Who knows, maybe enterprise is fine buying 2 year old models, but RIM can force the issue by EOLing those old models.
Funny thing, I have a friend who works in finance. He has to carry a BB and his work blocks much of the web. So he brings his 3G iPad to work everyday to check his personal email rather than a second smartphone. And his wife, who has a dumbphone, is leaning towards a 3G iPad rather than upgrade to an iPhone. This is probably more relevant to a Touchpad discussion, since it implies maybe there’s some merit to HP’s strategy of ignoring the smartphone market for the tablet market.
June 22nd, 2011 at 2:44 pm
RIM in a nutshell.
http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1556.html
June 22nd, 2011 at 3:21 pm
I don’t think that’s fair. RIMM obviously recognized the shortcomings of the current BB OS and worked on their next gen platform in the background. It’s possible that they were a year late in getting started. But do remember, in that time span, they sold 50 million blackberries. Would it have made sense to do something that would jeopardize current sales?
I predict that QNX will make it onto RIM high end phones in early 2012, and it will be a nice OS whose biggest flaw will be that it’s not Android or iOS. And RIMM eventually ports what’s good about the BB business model to a heavily skinned Android phone (2 years too late). I can see the same thing happening to webOS.
June 22nd, 2011 at 4:58 pm
I think Palm was a year late. RIM is about 3 years late. I still see the AOL analogy as the proper one. After everyone started getting the real internet, folks kept paying premium AOL prices out of inertia. But the AOL people convinced themselves that people kept paying because of the great service.
I think RIM is the same way. The iPhone never really bit into the Blackberry market too much, but Android has taken a big chunk (after already having killed off Palm, WinMo & Symbian). It’s just been a tidal wave, with 5-6 megacorps all focusing their energy on building out the platform and trying to keep pace with Apple.
At least webOS has the spunky underdog thing going for it. We’ll see if that translates into decent device sales.
June 22nd, 2011 at 11:08 pm
It’s interesting how different the enterprise is compared to the consumer market. Three years ago, Blackberry was on the hands of 90% of enterprise users, and it’s still going strong, while Apple is making significant inroads. At my company, I’d say 80% of new hires choose iPhone over Blackberry — and it’s fully supported by our IT. Android isn’t supported, a I don’t know a single person whose company pays for an Android device or officially supports them (though clearly they, and webOS, can probably do anything necessary, like checking Exchange email).
I think the Blackberry’s days are numbered, as kids demand their iPhones be supported in their jobs — clearly people’s love of their personal phone is what’s driving iPhone into the enterprise. I wonder I there’s room for someone to really move into the business space, or if the war’s already over.
June 23rd, 2011 at 12:25 am
I do have a friend whose company allows them to choose between blackberries, iPhones, or specific supported Android phones (these phones are provided by the company).
June 23rd, 2011 at 12:51 am
Rim being 3 years late is easy to see in retrospect. Obviously, no competitor had an accurate threat assessment of the iPhone. I certainly didn’t. Having been brainwashed by palm, it seemed like one-handed qwerty operation was actually of some value. But look at RIM’s track record up to that point. They didn’t chase the thin trend, the flip phone trend, or the thin flip phone trend. They stuck to their guns and were proven right more than a few times. You say that the second the iPhone got released, they should have stopped making blackberries and worked full bore on an all touchscreen iPhone clone? Whose to say they would have been any better off? Actually, other than Apple, who is better off than Rim? Would you really rather be HTC or Motorola or Samsung? Is there any reason why RIM can’t just be any of those android clone makers right now? What have they lost by “being 3 years late?”
June 23rd, 2011 at 4:03 am
So many questions!
I bring up the AOL analogy for good reason, and it’s a thought that’s been in my head for a couple years at least. The irony of AOL is that right as its doom was being ensured with the rise of the open internet and high-speed access, AOL was lucky beneficiary of those same trends for a couple years. That is, a huge new population segment was getting online, and the easy answer was AOL. But the service was overpriced and offered no clear advantages– and once high speed access costs came down, it made no sense.
That’s Blackberry c. 2007. The iPhone came along and showed what a phone with good web access could do. And 3G connections were coming along at the same time, and there was a point to it all. Email was (and still is, by all accounts) great on the BlackBerry, and in the early days of the iPhone some of the most compelling content was email. Free was cheap enough. The smartphone tsunami was arriving. Right about January 2007, it’s not that RIM had to abandon all plans and make iBerry. But they should’ve seen the broad trends. Certainly that was about the point that Palm ditched the next gen PalmOS and made their bold move. By December 2008, the iPhone was a juggernaut with the 3G and the app store. The competition to that point seemed more about cargo cult copying rather than trying to understand the whole package. Witness the Instinct, G1, Storm and others. While the future may not have been obvious in January 2007, it was no longer in doubt less than 2 years later.
It’s easy to forget that at the time it was released, webOS & the Pre was the first platform that understood & applied the lessons of the iPhone– apart from build quality, I suppose. That it took 2 years for WinPho and 2.5 years for a Meego phone is a good indication that’s about when it sunk in from Redmond to Finland. RIM didn’t figure out what they needed to do until April 2010!!! You could argue that BlackBerry could compete OK with the iPhone but couldn’t survive the 1-2 punch that Android created with one of the most dramatic product ramps in electronics history. But there’s still no excuse for waiting more than 3 years after the launch of the iPhone to start working on the next-generation platform.
Is RIM better off than the Android makers? Maybe today, but given their inability to “pivot” I wouldn’t bet on it being true in 2 more years. I’d be surprised to see a QNX phone widely available until Q2 2012. They may have a lot of loyal customers to sustain them, but a couple more mis-steps like the PlayBook launch or OS5/6/7 fiasco (3 different OSes on phone, all due to be deprecated within a year) and even that won’t be enough.
I know I’ve made this point before, but I think it’s spot on so I’ll make it again. RIM & Nokia should’ve engaged in a bidding war for Palm back in January 2009, they’d have been able to support their old platforms while transitioning to a pretty damn good thing that was more than 2 years ahead of what they had in house. Hindsight & all that, but man, for RIM to buy QNX to build a next gen phone when they could’ve had webOS for effectively pocket change at the same time seems unfathomable.
June 23rd, 2011 at 12:02 pm
This is a pretty interesting read about how Nokia was “disrupted” by Apple and Google. They did not come to the same conclusion as you that webOS could have saved them :p.
http://www.unwiredview.com/2011/06/22/how-nokia-was-disrupted-part-1/
June 28th, 2011 at 2:53 pm
Crazy news out today that Google is activating half a million Android devices a day (and growing). HTC itself will probably sell more devices than Apple within the next few quarters, and is probably the second most valuable company in mobile by market cap. Yet for their phenomenal success, what do they have that RIM or Nokia couldn’t replicate in a month if they threw their hat into the Android ring? For that matter, HP too? Sense UI?