Over the years, I have proudly acknoledged that I was one of the first 100,000 Blackberry users. The fact is at Esther Dyson’s PC Forum in 1999 RIM provided Blackberry units to all conference attendees ore-populated with the name and contact info of everyone. It was a brilliant move that obtained early adopters to try the device. And it worked! Pre-Blackberry, our company had been using Motorola pagers. I think my page address was PAGESCOTT@Motorola.com.
Over the years, new mobile devices have come and gone and come again, but I remained fierce in my loyalty. Many times I would reiterate “from my cold dead hands will you get me to give up my blackberry”. In another words “NEVER”. I could not care about the sexy iPhone or apps, or better browsing. I wanted dependable, reliable, and secure email.
With the recent outage, I am finally looking at alternatives. I hate the idea of a touch screen keyboard — really really do not look forward to learning to type on something the in the past I could do in the dark. And I am not one to accept that all things must change, but it is time.
Research In Motion (RIM), you fucked up. Bigtime. I could have accepted the inferior product on so many fronts, but the recent failure and lack of dependability make it stupid for me not to look at alternatives.
First Eastman Kodak and now RIM. Change and bankruptcy is in your future. You may be hoping for a last minute white knight to buy your company, but I doubt that anyone will step up. My only decision going forward is when and whether I chose an Apple iPHONE or Google Android.
Thanks for all those years of service, and I’m sure your replacement will cause me heartache too, but you guys blew it. Big time. Go crawl in a hole and make your excuses. You had it, you lost it. Sad day.