Quoth Stephen Fry about the new Blackberry Storm:
An accelerometer is a device that lets an object know which way up it is. That’s just what the RIM corporation itself seems to need, for it is clear that with the release of this dog they don’t know their tits from their tibias.
And his isn’t the only brutal review of the storm around. It seems to be universally panned to the point of hate.
It’s RIM’s attempt to build an iPhone. It even includes one actual honest attempt to innovate: Its touchscreen clicks down physically like apple’s new macbook trackpads. They screwed it up royally, but that’s sort of the point: These dinosaurs of the old age tend to run themselves full tilt into a wall when faced with revolutionary competitors. When you’re the market leader, you don’t make a product that is way more immature than the new competition. Everyone that values stability and patience, the one market you get for free, goes running to your competitor. What could possibly possess RIM to screw up so gigantically?
Palm self destructed spectacularly when it faced some marginal competition, but the handheld device market isn’t the only industry that has kindly committed seppuku to let the new blood run rampant. Microsoft is finally getting some actual pushback on many fronts and in response they hand over the keys to the kingdom to Steve ‘chairsbane monkeydance’ the marketer. A marketer? Microsoft? Bill Gates would turn in his grave… is what we would have said if he wasn’t the guy that made that happen. Is self-destructing microsoft part of his new humanitarian efforts? Microsoft’s recent OS release, utterly ignorant of a new world filled with notebooks, netbooks, and mobile phones, all of which want slick kernels that know how to conserve power, is such a fantastic dud that it defies comprehension. That took 7 years?
Piracy became a somewhat serious problem when it became easy and pedestrian. Before napster, a dedicated individual could pay 5 bucks a month for newsgroup access and download -whatever- he could possibly want as fast as his pipe can carry it. But you need some serious technical knowhow. Napster and its children, and even bittorrent, via sites like the pirate bay, make fast transfer easy for everybody. -THAT- scares the pants off of the RIAA and the MPAA. How do they respond? By making the piracy easier than the real thing by charging prohibitive prices for legal online downloads, getting stuck in a new format war, and adding unskippable piracy warnings in front of every movie. The only way I can make sense of this move is if the MPAA is kindly downing the family size bottle of sleeping pills in order to make way for a new digital distribution age.
How about the car industry? “Bailout”. Nuff said. The sheer insanity of the leaders of the big three in the US has already been covered far better in numerous other places.
What in the world possesses these companies to self destruct so quickly when faced with something they do not understand?
One thing I do know: Without the convenient propensity of the big hulking elephants in the industry to shoot themselves in the face, the world wouldn’t be moving forward nearly as quickly. Thank you, dinosaurs. Thank you very much.