Rubbish and hogwash
Personally, I think RIM is the laughing stock of the smart phone industry. I have developed for pretty much all the platforms at some level or another and found RIM to be just a joke.
Let's look at the way they treat developers. Before I could even get my hands on the SDK to decide whether I wanted to develop for Blackberry, it wanted A LOT of information from me. I couldn't even look at the docs without signing away my life. Screw that... sorry you need me... I don't need you.
Then they're treating people like idiots. They're selling QNX as if it were a solution to everything. QNX for lack of anything else is simply another unix kernel. One that was designed to run in real-time which utterly sucks for user experience in general (programmed for QNX, it's no exception) and in general, with the exception of a more or less great kernel for things like machine control, was REALLY REALLY incomplete. I don't know if they still do it, but they built the entire UI on top of Photon GUI which is a really bad hack that is similar in nature to the Xt and Motif programming paradigm which made coding for Unix in the old days miserable.
Their platform is heavily based on Java. This is actually utter crap. Java is neat for running applets, but without a proper native code interface (like that found on Android), there's no hope for a platform like this. No one wants to port their apps to java and using tools which compile other languages into java generally suck. So the only apps you'll get are from die hard freaks and script kiddies.
But, now that I've based how crappy I feel blackberry really is and how I think the guys marketting it are a bunch of crooks for lying to the public and to their investors about how QNX will make a different in their boring as shit software paradigm, let's talk about investors.
If your company sucks and can't make money and survive on its own, investors are really important and lying, cheating, stealing and selling babies are perfectly reasonable to keep the investors from taking over your company. After all, letting professional gamblers have a say in what you're doing is stupid... well unless you happen to be a casino.
If you have a product which is interesting and able to support your company, then investors can yap yap yap all they want and frankly, they're irrelevant since so long as you don't need to ask the professional gamblers for more money, the value of your share has nothing to do with whether your company succeeds or not.
RIM unfortunately has become a pretty big joke among serious developers. We don't even pick on Windows Phone the way we laugh at the pathetic offering from RIM. When we talk with each other, we say things like "Watch where you step, you don't want to step in the BlackBerry development world" and stuff like "Ewww... you're a Blackberry developer" and pull away, scared it might get on you.
Because of that, I have to say, unless Blackberry can somehow recover some cool, they might as well close up shop or just become the next Nokia and use either Android or Windows Phone 7. It's entirely clear that their not capable of making their own software.
Oh... P.S. - to all those freaks out there who want to talk about how secure BlackBerry is since it's never been hacked etc... that's yesterday's Blackberry... today's has enough functionality that it's becoming more hackable by the day and it'll take some time before they catch up with the other platforms again. Lack of hackability was directly linked to lack of functionality.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
