Rant: Blackberry Buzzkill

RIM earlier this week made the maligned announcement that the much anticipated Playbook OS 2.0 wouldn't be out until February 2012. RIM made clear that they wanted very much to have the product in our hands today, but unfortunately had to make the difficult decision to wait until they were confident they had a decent, complete and market-ready product. Well, that sure does speak a lot about the initial launch of the Blackberry Playbook, doesn't it?

The leaders at Blackberry have shrouded themselves in a cloud mushroom of lies and broken promises, and are desperately trying to make amends of their tattered public image by hiding behind a veil of PR small talk. Whatever it is they're doing, it's really not working because more than ever, consumers have lost faith in what was once the beloved makers of the Blackberry. A few months ago, the well-informed technology society was given the clearest indication that RIM was a breaking company. Aside from the declining market share and dwindling influence that was so plainly obvious on the outside, the open letter written by a disheartened RIM employee to RIM's senior management team gave us a snapshot of the turmoil residing inside RIM's inner sanctum. It became clear that it was not only a company that was losing a battle to the competition, but a company that was a losing a battle to itself, a company run by people who forgot their goal and were too busy playing catch up to recognise what they were really here for.

RIM's response to this letter funnily enough encapsulated entirely what was so wrong with this company - they were, and still are, completely out of touch. The letter response dodged every single valid question and objection posed to the RIM senior management team, cluelessness was haplessly disguised in phoney statements of optimism and opportunity pursuits, written by a person who much like the group he represented had absolutely no idea what he was doing.

Which brings me to now, and why I'm writing this rant today.

Back when the Playbook launched, the RIM leaders promised a native email client, a native contact client and a native calendar app 'soon'. We later found out that the root cause for the delays of these instrumental applications was deep within the foundations of RIM's system itself. We accepted this, so we gave RIM time. After Blackberry World 2011 RIM representatives told the press that we would be getting native email sometime this 'summer' without a specific date. We waited. We never got it. We were then told Playbook OS 2.0 would be made available in mid October after Blackberry Devcon America. But it wasn't. And now it's been pushed back 4 months to February 2012 which will make it little less than a year for an update that really should have been available from day 1.

Buying the Playbook always meant taking the good with the bad, and with the Playbook it meant filling a few gaping holes with a few tolerable compromises. Being an early adopter means buying products not for what they are, but for the potential that you see in them. When I bought the Blackberry Playbook, I didn't turn my back on it and make snide remarks on the absence of essentials, but I saw it for the multitasking prowess that QNX possessed and the ways it could integrate with RIM's acclaimed services and their overall vision.

Early adopters drive the market, and they drive competition. Without them, there wouldn't be a tablet market at all, but merely an iPad market; because what sober person, save for the Apple haters, would pick up a Honeycomb tablet as the product it is today against the iPad 2 as it is today. I'm trying to remain as objective as I possibly can here, so here's a few points you can't possibly argue against - Honeycomb has a serious app deficiency against the iPad and Honeycomb is unarguably a less stable operating system. And a few subjective points that I hold against Honeycomb are the inconsistency of aesthetics within the UI and the utter uselessness of multiple home-screens on a large display.

But I digress. The crucial point here is that early adopters are driven by promise of what will be delivered in the future. As an early adopter of the Blackberry Playbook I was fed by the promise of native email, native calendar, native contacts 'soon', 3 essentials that would make the Playbook a more complete utility - something that the product wasn't when it launched. It's taken more than half a year and deducing from RIM's sly previous efforts at PR, these three native apps are nowhere close to fruition.

Congratulations on killing the buzz, and absolutely butchering the first year of your entrance into the tablet world RIM. Stellar job. You failed to excite the average consumer market, you failed to entice the enterprise, and worse, you made the early adopters second guess their risky investment in buying your incomplete product. I don't regret purchasing a Playbook, not at all. In fact, despite its glaring omissions I'm still proud to say it's the greatest tablet on the market. But, had I known RIM were going to take their sweet time in blessing us with native email, contacts and calendar then I sure as hell would have taken my time in buying one too.