My Geekdom

RIM No Longer A Viable Company

RIM, arguably the manufacturer of the first successful smartphone, the Blackberry, has not only lost its market lead, but is facing a rather unpredictable future. RIM's new CEO, Thorsten Heins, has stated that RIM is open to acquisition. At least for the short-term, his statements have led to a one-day, 5% bounce back of the stock price which was down 70% in the 12 months.

RIM's History

For those of you that are unaware of RIM's history, it got its start in Canada as a 2-way pager provider. In 1999, RIM moved into the smartphone market with its first Blackberry and immediately achieved market dominance.

Factors that led to their dominance included:

• Intelligent Marketing::One example was a giving away pre-1.0 Blackberries to attendees of the 1999 JavaOne conference. I imagine that there wasn't a better set of beta testers than the gadget geeks that attended JavaOne (myself include).
• Sales Channels::RIM was selling its 2-way pagers to professionals who had a need to be in constant communication such as doctors, attorneys, business executives, and law enforcement. With the introduction of the Blackberry, RIM just added a better product to offer those same professionals. Sure it was more expensive, but 2-way pagers were already fairly costly. They were the perfect audience to market smartphones to.
• First To Market::In 1999, most mobile providers were focused on upgrading their networks from analog to digital. Once the digital networks were in place, new functionality such as internet access would be easy to providing. But upgrading networks takes time. It involves men climbing towers, FCC regulations, local zoning laws, etc. But RIM didn't have to do this.

RIM's Brilliance

In what I consider a spectacular marketing and technological move, RIM started providing internet service over their existing 2-way pager network. While only a short-term solution as the 2-way pager network was designed for low-bandwidth usage, it was instantaneous. The first Blackberry was basically a 2-way pager with a good sized screen and full QWERTY keyboard.

What Went Wrong

RIM's mistake was that they didn't learn from prior boom-to-bust technology companies. RIM seems to have perfectly followed the (mis)steps of Digital Electronics. While IBM has survived, it lost its market dominance in a sector, twice. The first time as a manufacture of mainframes in the 1970's and then again as a PC manufacturer in the 1980's. Apollo Computers, SGI, Xerox, all leaders at one time, are either gone or no longer of interest.

All of these companies suffered from a similar set of mistakes including:

• Overconfidence::Each company thought that they were invulnerable. IBM is perhaps the best example. In the 1970's, when an IT manager had to make a decision about what gigantic computer to buy, they often said "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.".
• Lack of Foresight::Technology and markets change and so too must your company. Clearly RIM, along with its arch-rival Palm, both missed the boat. Phones went from being personal communication devices to be tiny, fit-in-your-pocket, computers.
• Unwillingness to Self-Cannibalize::In order to stay ahead of the technology market, you must be willing to come out with products that are better and cheaper than your existing products. HP and Goodyear are two companies that get this. Within a product line, HP routinely comes out with a better and cheaper printer than the one they currently have on the market. They know that it is going to kill sales of their existing printer. But HP also knows that when their customers need a new printer, it will be an HP printer. I know that Goodyear isn't considered a technology company, but their product, tires, involve high-tech materials and manufacturing processes. The CEO of Goodyear once asked how do you keep a company in business when you know that your next product is going to be cheaper, better, and last longer than your current product? While I think that HP and Goodyear would both prefer to keep selling their old products, they know better. It seems RIM didn't.

The Final Outcome

In the end, RIM, the makers of the Blackberry that was a status symbol for business executives in the 1990's, has all but been put out of business by Apple, a waning computer company in 1990, and Google, a non-existent company in 1990.

The trick to surviving in the high-tech marketplace is simple. All you need to do is realize that your market share is never safe, that there is always another company working on something that is better than what you have, and that you must act if you are fighting for your life, all-day, everyday.

Interpreting this chart from Nielsen (via Wired) does not require any great amount of effort.

It can be summarized by any of the following sentences:

• The greater your income the more likely you are to have a smartphone.
• Young adults are more likely to have smartphones than older adults.
• Smartphones are only for the young and get outgrown by the old. (Nah! But it is a valid interpretation of th e chart.)

But I think the graph can best be summarized by:

Perhaps not the best grammar but I think it gets the point across. It becomes even more dramatic when you look at the number of people who have acquired smartphones in the past three months:

As Robin would say: Holy ubiquitous computing, Batman!

It seems clear that this is where the money is. This means that some subset of technologies such as HTML5, virtual computing, Scala, Hadoop, AWS, and CouchDB, to name just a few, are going to be the technologies of tomorrow.

In my lifetime, I have seen computers revolutionize society in several different ways.

Back office

Back office computerization led to the popularization of ATMs, credit cards, Fed Ex and its overnight delivery service, and set the stage for the online marketplace we are familiar with today.

Personal computers

Personal computers introduced computing to the public. When I was in school, I would get bonus points for typing my homework assignments. Today, homework assignments must be printed from a word processor if not submitted electronically.

The web

The web, for the first time ever, connected the back office directly to consumers in the comfort of their own home. ATMs allowed you to get 24x7 access to your bank account, but you needed to be at an ATM. PCs gave you access to many digital technologies, but having multiple computers interact was difficult, slow, and frequently expensive. But throw in the web and suddenly: BOOM! You have the online shopping, video gaming, and video on demand that we live in today.

As a diehard nerd, I'm thrilled to have lived through these technical revolutions. Not only have I lived through them, but I've had the honor of having been an early consumer and even helped develop some of them. So, with great joy, and without trying to sound too greedy, I am joyous that the next revolutionary wave is coming to shore. And it is called ubiquitous computing.

I don't claim to be the prognosticator of prognosticators. Wikipedia's page on ubiquitous computing was created two years ago. I'm just happy to be around to be part of it and hope that I get a chance to surf the wave.

Just thought I'd add a list of my patents as of Tue Feb 21, 2012:

• US Patent #7,979,891: Method and System for Securing Execution of Untrusted Applications, July 2011 This patent, in combination with 7,814,556 defines a model for enforcing J2EE (a.k.a: JEE) application security via sandboxing within a single Java VM.
• US Patent #7,814,556: System and Method for Protecting APIs from Untrusted or Less Trusted Applications, October 2010xo See patent 7,979,891 immediately above.
• US Patent #7,610,813: Servlet Authentication Filters, October 2009 An extension of the J2EE (a.k.a: JEE) Servlets model that provides an integrated and pluggable model for authentication for Servlets. JSR-196 extended the ideas introduced in this patent so that the concepts are now a standard part of J2EE.
• US Patent #7,487,207: System and method for determining the functionality of a software application based on nodes within the software application and transitions between the nodes, February 2009 Defines a model-view-controller (MVC) model for implementing web applications. Apache Struts is based on the ideas defined in this patent.
• US Patent #7,051,069: System for managing logical process flow in an online environment, May 2006 Earlier version of 7,487,207 immediately above.
• US Patent application pending #20,060,031,855: System and Method for Runtime Interface Versioning, February 2006 The concepts embodied in this patent application have been used to ensure backwards compatibility for WebLogic Server's Security SPIs. The implementation of this patent allows the server to continue to add new functionality to the SPIs while maintaining forwards compatibility for security. As of January 2012, all security providers written since 2002 are compatible with the newest server version. Any current security SPI class ending with "V2" is utilizing the design model in this patent.
• US Patent #5,787,447: Memory allocation maintaining ordering across multiple heaps, July 1998 A memory allocation algorithm that supported incremental modification of ELF executables, while maintaining the ordering required by ELF as well as existing Solaris tools (eg: dbx) without requiring restarting of the application or the tools.