Jan 26, 2009 09:10 AM
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At launch, the BlackBerry Storm was so buggy RIM promised patches before it even landed in consumers' hands. RIM Co-CEO Jim Balsillie now explains the situation perfectly: Buggy, busted ass smartphones are the "new reality."
That's right, the "new reality" is that your smartphone is going to be buggy as crap right out of the box because the maker scrambled to meet a deadline "by the skin of their teeth." In other words, beta culture is here to stay, and you better like it.
Sorry Jim, but that makes you sound like an asshole (even if you are a nice guy, like your co-CEO Mike Lazaridis, who I very much enjoyed talking to before the Storm launch). Both on the face of it—customers should get used to waiting for a patch to make the phone they just spent a few hundred bucks on actually work?—and because you're the CEO of the company that used to make the most bulletproof smartphones in the business. Granted, you have screwed up your last two major launches—the Storm, obviously, and the Bold, which AT&T held back for months in the States while you tried to work the bugs out—but now you're just giving up on the idea of products that just work right out of the box?
Here's a thought: Ship products that actually work! Google's crap is in perpetual beta and the G1 came out of the gate better than the Storm or the iPhone, phones from companies that are supposedly obsessed with user experience. W.T.F. I know you wanted to hit Black Friday and rushed the Storm to the market for Black Friday—where you managed to sell 500,000 in the first month, according to the WSJ—but think of every customer you lost because they heard how crapfrickintastic the Storm was.
If you're not even gonna bother trying, why should we? [WSJ]
Send an email to matt buchanan, the author of this post, at matt@gizmodo.com.
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