RIM's new CEO Thorsten Heins kicked off the company's annual BlackBerry World Conference in Orlando yesterday with a message that was decidedly enterprise-oriented. Speaking to an audience that represented 115 different countries, Mr. Heins was clearly targeting his message to the "BlackBerry Faithful" who he identified as hyper-connected "people with a purpose". His message focused on BlackBerry enabling success and saving time, and he used the words "nimble" and "agile" so often they may have been tattooed on his wrist.
Of course the big thing everyone wanted to hear about was the long-awaited BlackBerry 10 (BB 10) operating system, which is reportedly "making incredible progress." Heins conceded that RIM had taken the "hard road" with the transition to BB 10, and they were focusing on a platform for "mobile computing" and not just smartphones. The company is releasing the developers' kit for BB 10 this week, and promising one of the unreleased Dev Alpha handsets to each of the developers in attendance.
The Dev Alpha device allowed RIM's Head of Software, Vivek Bhadwaj to join Mr. Heins on stage for a demo. At first glance, the home screen looks a lot like the Metro interface on Windows Phone, with four large "tiles". With a flicking gesture, apps could be moved to the side, and they emphasized the multitasking capabilities of BB 10, which like the PlayBook tablet, allows you to have multiple applications running simultaneously.
The Dev Alpha appeared to have no buttons, but while it will have users "typing on glass", BlackBerry clearly hasn’t abandoned its legacy of making the best mobile keyboard. The touch-keyboard was shown in portrait mode, and the keys were big and square. The user can also shift between letters and numbers by "flicking" up or down, and it does have learning software so accuracy should improve with use.
To speed up the typing process, the software continuously tries to "guess" the next word you're going to type. The iPhone also suggests the next word, but BB 10 gives the user a bunch of guesses, each of which is positioned immediately above the first letter of the suggestion. So typing common phrases should take one tap per word. iPhone users will just let Siri do the typing for them.
Reemphasizing the enterprise focus, Mr. Heins was also joined on stage by executives from Salesforce.com and Cisco, but with so little of substance to say, the speech seemed to go on a little longer than it needed to. I think anyone who was "nimble" and "agile" was scooting for the door.
Probably the most ludicrous prop was a tricked-up Porsche that was an illustration of the "future vision of mobility". Of course it was using the QNX operating system on which BB 10 is based and had two monitors in the back seat for video teleconferencing or gaming--in the back seat of a Porsche? So RIM's vision of the future is apparently avid gamers with no legs.
What I took away from all this was that RIM is essentially conceding the consumer market to Apple and Android at least in the near term; that is certainly the case for North America and most of the developed world. To regain its bearings, it's redoubling efforts at maintaining what remains of its core base of followers in hopes of one day growing from that. Unfortunately, the enterprise market is a small fraction of the consumer base that represented 70% of RIM's sales a few years back.
While this strategy may do a little to slow defections from the BlackBerry platform, at least it's a strategy and RIM knows how to talk to that customer much more effectively than to consumers. That's good because the job of Chief Marketing Officer apparently remains unfilled, as no announcements were made on that front.
Mr. Heins is a different face for RIM, though it's hard to see a lot of passion under that Teutonic exterior. Unlike his predecessor, Jim Balsillie, at least you don’t get the feeling he was going to climb down off the stage and punch somebody. In short, the big news seems to be there's not much in the way of "big news" at BlackBerry right now, and we'll have to wait until later this year to see what type of reception BB 10 gets with and beyond the BlackBerry faithful.
