@harrymccracken RIM needs to switch to Android and/or WP7. They make great handsets, just need a better platform. BBM on Android FTW!—
Mike Poullas (@mikepoullas) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Unlink divisions: hope 4 some successes (Enterprise Msg; BBM) to survive w x-platform s/w despite handset&PlayBk implosions—
Walt French (@WaltFrench) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Merge with Nokia.—
Sky Hussar (@skyhussar) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken less models and more difference between them, one with keyboard, one without and one with touch and keyboard (torch)—
Wim Schelfaut (@wim_s) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken position RIM to play to its strengths — data security, enterprise deployment, device mgmt + differentiate with services.—
Daniel Leslie (@dan_leslie) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Draw xy coordinates, and fit 1 BB phone in each quadrant. X & Y are key customer types & product features, etc.—
Justin Adams (@justinfadams) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken windows :)—
Manu Kumar (@ManuKumar) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Android.—
Matt Baxter-Reynolds (@mbrit) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken RIM should sell server biz to IBM, sell patents to Google, place former TAT team at Apple, and dissolve company.—
David Oliver (@davidmoliver) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken position RIM to play to its strengths — data security, enterprise deployment, device mgmt + differentiate with services.—
Daniel Leslie (@dan_leslie) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Fork Android a la Kindle Fire, build core BB apps on top of it.—
Jason Snell (@jsnell) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken people hate Blackberry devices but they would love the enterprise services on their own devices no matter which OS.—
Gurpreet Bedi (@grprtbedi) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken That sounds like a prescription for an orderly winding down of the business.—
Ed Bott (@edbott) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Sell the hardware business and focus on providing high end enterprise solutions like mail and BBM to other mobile OSes.—
Gurpreet Bedi (@grprtbedi) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken RIM shud build on niche as a corp device and work with enterprise SaaS i.e Salesforce to value add and justify CTOs trust—
Ameer Zulkifli (@ameerplusone) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken RE RIM They desperately need an iTunes competitor. Native music, movies and apps that sync seamlessly (& Better Appps)—
Derrick LeBlanc (@docleblanc126) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Step 1. Realize you can't compete with Android or iOS Step 2. Find the People who don't like those two. Step 3. Sell—
Joshua Johnson (@JoshuaJohnsonT) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Utilize the current management tools to support Droid, iPhone, and Windows phones. Become a Mobile Security Software firm—
G (@yourpersnlgeek) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken give complete creative control to The Astonishing Tribe—
Chris Baluzy (@cbaluzy) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Focus on 2-3 devices, give them zippy performance, get more people to develop apps for BlackBerry.—
Martin Pinnau (@martinpinnau) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Kill PlayBook +BBOS licensing plan; reduce product range; focus BBOS on biz/corp, use Android/WP for 'consumer'—
Andy Weir (@gcaweir) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken re RIM. Make access to Rim services ubiquitous. Building hardware is expensive. i.e. playbook. Far better to build an app—
John Wright (@fortyrunner) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Cut off all current devices and make something new.—
Deep Soni (@xDeepS) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken re RIM. Cut back product lines to Business and Consumer b/berries. Build a set of iOS, Android, Win mobile, OSX, Win apps.—
John Wright (@fortyrunner) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Hire executives that understand the position the company is in and are not already tainted by its corporate culture.—
Dan Seifert (@dcseifert) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken 100% focus on enterprise smartphone market via HW redesign. Better integration with enterprise tools than iPhone/Android.—
Eric Andersen (@eric_andersen) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken As CEO or RIM, I'd partner with Google on Android ASAP. Not going to survive on their own.—
Keith Thompson (@kdttaz) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken
1. Get new OS phone working
2. Get devs engaged, apps vital
3. Build tools to make life easier for devs
4. FEEDBACK & FIX—
bastien koert (@phpster) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Do what it takes to get products finished in a timely fashion so they work and can be released without delays or bugs.—
Laura (@lak611) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken ditch BBOS. adopt #windowsphone. differentiate around BBM, enterprises services and those awesome keyboard devices—
Vijay Vadlamani (@VJV87) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken approach Microsoft for port of their phone OS—
PiNT (@P1NT) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken … Not to mention standalone iOS and Android BBM apps—
Michael Ouzounian (@edwardcbear) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken cut losses, perhaps take playbook off the market. Then focus on restoring BB's image. Product lifecycles considered.—
DHimself (@thatdarryl) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken @iansherr I would close the gap between "what we can contribute to mobile" and "what we should contribute to mobile"—
Behzod Sirjani (@beh_zod) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Go back and reconsider if Android Player is going to be a great feature of your OS going forward. Then build a great OS.—
Jeremy Stanley (@JeremyDStanley) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken RIM needs to get good apps on the platform (Playbook, BB10). Bribe developers as needed. App selection sucks, quality poor.—
Chris Saldanha (@ChristoDeluxe) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Offer only 2 products. Design them to be the “serious” choice for business & government. Position competition as “toys.”—
Kevin Mercuri (@KevinMercuri) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken trim all the fact and get down and dirty like a startup again.—
Matthew Davis (@Matt_JDavis) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Focus on enterprise (Security, Integration, SAP, Adminstriationm…) try not to be (a 2nd grade) Apple.—
Stephan Schmidt (@codemonkeyism) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken license BBM to Nokia/Microsoft and push Windows Phone integrated services. You've gotta come up with a cash cow somehow.—
Michael Ouzounian (@edwardcbear) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Consolidate the company to focus on phones, group hardware, eliminate fragmentation, and use open standards for BIS and BBM.—
Harris Kleyman (@maclover009) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Forget America – sell what you can, including assets, and concentrate on international market.—
Charles Pinker (@cdpinker) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Switch to WP and make back end server licenses free. Outdated OS and expensive/complex server backend are the biggest probs.—
John Denver (@ntman68) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Get Meego.—
Manik (@Manik_K) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Innovate the hell out of something. That's all I got.—
Cynthia Schames (@CynthiaSchames) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Start producing Windows Phone hardware like Nokia.—
Paras Valecha (@ParasValecha) January 23, 2012

@harrymccracken Stop the PlayBook and get back to core competencies.—
Peter Cohen (@flargh) January 23, 2012

No institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive.

Peter Kafka of All Things D reports:

Research In Motion isn’t broken, so no need to break it up. But it needs better internal focus, and better external focus, too.

That’s the takeaway from new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins, who told analysts this morning that he thinks the company is in pretty good shape, all things considered. Sure, in the U.S., it has been roughed up by Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android, but it’s still used by lots of people, has lots of fans in big companies and big government agencies, and lots of users around the world.

The company has posted a video in which Heins talks about his new gig:

If Heins isn’t prepared to speak eloquently about the road ahead quite yet, that doesn’t mean that he’s clueless or that he won’t do a good job. I also understand why he might be inclined to say nice things about Lazaridis, Balsillie, and the RIM team. I’ll even cut the company slack for the spin it’s putting on the executive change, which is that it’s happening because RIM is doing so well, not because it’s in trouble.

But if you’re rooting, as I am, for RIM to leave its doldrums behind and make some really great products, there’s nothing in the new CEO’s video to inspire any confidence. He does point out a few areas where the company can improve. (One of them is marketing, which seems to me to be a matter which won’t do a thing to turn around the company, unless it’s marketing for as-yet-unreleased fabulous phones.)

Mostly, though, he seems to say that the last four years have been hunky-dory, that RIM is moving in the right direction, and that it’s a company defined by its commitment to innovation. He also marvels at the upcoming BlackBerry 10 operating system being put together in eighteen months–which is a strange thing to be marveling about given that the first BlackBerry 10 phones have been delayed until late this year, almost six years after the announcement of the iPhone.

As Heins says repeatedly in the video, he’s been at RIM for the past four years. Despite his cheery take, it’s been a bleak period for the company, mostly because it’s released so many half-baked products–the Storm, the Storm 2, the Torch, the PlayBook–and generally behaved like a company that no longer understands the industry it helped to create. He surely helped create this mess, and already, in this video, he sounds like he’s channeling Lazaridis and Balsillie’s blithe attitude towards the company’s existential challenges.

Of course, RIM has dug itself such a deep hole that even the most radical new CEO would have trouble formulating a strategy to set things right. BlackBerry 10 is a horribly overdue response to the iPhone, but Heins isn’t going to be able to switch game plans and get anything out more quickly. At this point, all he can do is to ensure that the first BlackBerry 10 handsets are as good as they can possibly be, and that the company knows what to do after they ship. And even that might not be enough to keep it relevant.

If you’re still holding out hope for a RIM turnaround, you need to concentrate your optimism on two specific areas:

* Maybe BlackBerry 10 and the phones that run it will be so spectacular that they’ll not only convince current RIM customers to stick around but also steal businesses and consumers away from the iPhone and Android;

* Perhaps Heins is a quiet revolutionary who’s going to impose meaningful change on RIM rather than continuing the Lazaridis/Balsillie approach–but he’s just not ready to talk about it yet.

What do you think the odds are that both of these possibilities are true?

It may just be me, but I can’t remember many years as peculiar as 2o11 turned out to be for this business. Even demonstrably gifted and sensible people like Netflix’s Reed Hastings seemed to fall victim to a fever that made them do strange, ill-advised things. I hope that 2012 is a tad less weird, but 2011 has been fascinating to cover, and never, ever boring.

In hallowed Technologizer tradition, it’s time to recap the year in dumb. Celebrities, corporate intrigue, sex, violence–they’re all here. Gird yourself, people: Things are about to get really stupid.

(As always, thanks to Esquire’s iconic Dubious Achievement Awards and Business 2.0′s 101 Dumbest Moments in Business for inspiring this project. Those lists no longer exist, but we soldier on.)

January

1. Stop this woman before she tweets again.

Proceedings begin in a court case charging that rocker Courtney Love defamed fashion designer Dawn “Boudoir Queen” Simorangkir on Twitter and MySpace. A judge eventually rules that Love is guilty. She’s booted off Twitter for more than two months and must pay Simorangkir $430,000. By May, Love is in Twitter legal hot water again–this time over her tweets about her former lawyer.

2. Thrilling! At least if you hated Flock.

Social gaming behemoth Zynga buys pioneering social browser Flock. Shawn Hardin, Flock’s CEO, says he’s “thrilled” by the development. But it’s not until three months later that anyone involved admits that the acquisition is terrible news for Flock fans: the browser is being discontinued.

February

3. Bing sting.

Google injects fake results into search results to confirm its suspicion that Microsoft’s Bing is watching IE users’ Google searches and blending data from the results into Bing results. It publicly accuses Microsoft of cheating; Microsoft responds by mocking Google’s “spy-novelesque stunt.”

4. Penney which way you can.

The New York Times’ David Segal reports that retail relic J.C. Penney’s impressive rankings in Google search results on an array of topics have been goosed by the creation of phantom sites such as bulgariapropertyportal.com, which exist only to be stuffed with links to Penney’s pages. Google promises to take “corrective action” and Penney denies all knowledge.

5. Pity they couldn’t have bided their time until this digital thing blew over.

Once-mighty bookstore chain Borders declares bankruptcy and starts shuttering stores. In July, it announces that it’s going out of business, period. The retailer’s many missteps included refusing to operate its own Web site for years, doubling down on CD sales at the same time that the iPod was changing music forever, and taking e-books far less seriously than its major rivals, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

March

6. But wait–actors are real people too, aren’t they? Aren’t they?

At the CTIA conference in Orlando, Samsung shows videos featuring “real” people heartily endorsing its Galaxy Tab. They’re real, all right–real actors, as I eventually figure out.

7. Good to hear they can take a little criticism.

In the same video presentation, Samsung shows a mock article about the Galaxy Tab from a fake business magazine. The text is cribbed from my not-entirely-positive review of the original Galaxy Tab.

8. $3 billion worth of fail.

AT&T launches a $39 billion bid to acquire T-Mobile USA. The former Ma Bell is apparently pretty darn confident that the deal will go through: It tells T-Mobile that it’ll pay it a $3 billion fee (plus valuable spectrum) if it doesn’t. But both the Justice Department and the FCC hate the merger. In December, AT&T pulls the plug and says that T-Mobile will get its cash and spectrum.

9. In the 1990s, this would have been done with VHS and dial-up modems.

Rather than striking deals with movie companies, super-genius startup Zediva’s new streaming service takes advantage of what its founders think is a legal loophole: It involves DVDs and banks of Internet-connected DVD players. Oddly enough, Hollywood is nonplussed. In August, a judge closes the loophole.

10. Bring me the head of Babar the First.

Bob Parsons, founder of exuberantly cheesy domain registrar Go Daddy sparks outrage when he shares a video of himself shooting an elephant in Zimbabwe. He says that the pachyderm was a rogue and that starving villagers will benefit from the protein it provides. PETA, oddly enough, isn’t placated.

11. A blow to dupes and patsies everywhere.

Germany-based Auction site Swoopo, which turned bidding into gambling by making users pay a non-refundable fee each time they bid on an item, goes dark as its parent company files for bankruptcy.

April

12. A day or two? Hey, no biggie.

Sony’s PlayStation Network suffers an outage, for unspecified reasons; Sony calmly says it may take “a full day or two” to restore service.

13. Flippin’ ridiculous.

Two years after spending $550 million for Flip camcorder maker Pure Digital–and one day before a new Flip was scheduled to debut–Cisco suddenly loses interest in consumer products and kills the entire Flip line. At the time of its death, it’s the nation’s best-selling camcorder.

14. Apparently he was under the mistaken impression that BBC stood for “BlackBerry Cheerleaders.”

Irritated at questions about BlackBerry security and censorship issues in India and the Middle East, RIM founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis abruptly declares that his TV interview with the BBC is over.

15. PrayStation.

Sony says that the PlayStation Network has suffered an “external intrusion” and won’t be back online until it’s been fortified against further attacks. It make no predictions about when that might be. In all, it takes almost six weeks before it’s fully up and running again–and it turns out that whoever broken in stole personal information such as names and address for 70 million customers. Oh, and maybe credit-card information, too.

16. We said “professional.” We didn’t say “good.”

After seven months of ever-increasing hype, RIM releases the BlackBerry PlayBook, which it calls “the first professional tablet.” It’s remarkably buggy, includes a nearly unusable version of Flash, and lacks the one software feature that’s synonymous with the BlackBerry name: built-in e-mail.

May

17. The fine art of pointlessly raising expectations.

In an interview, HP’s European honcho says that its TouchPad–which was announced in February and isn’t supposed to ship until an unspecified date in the summer–will be better than the iPad. “We call it number one plus,” he helpfully explains.

18. Insert your own “weiner” joke here.

Anthony Weiner, a Democratic congressman from New York, means to send a dirty photograph of himself to a woman he doesn’t know as a direct message on Twitter. He accidentally posts it as a public tweet. After trying to convince the world that his account was hacked–and additional disclosures about other embarrassing tweets–he admits the cover-up and eventually resigns.

June

19. I love you. You love me.

Addressing mounting criticism from shareholders and the media, RIM co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie lavish praise on each other. “Jim and I have the perfect balance to make the hard decisions,” says Lazaridis. “…RIM has taken a unique path and the reason why we do things might not always be obvious from the outside.”

20. Maybe “never” would have been a better release date after all.

After fourteen years of delays, legendary unreleased game Duke Nukem–perhaps the most vaporous single product in the history of vaporware–is finally released. The reviews are unanimous: It’s a disaster in virtually every way a game can be disastrous, from the abysmal taste (alien rape jokes!) to the antiquated gameplay.

21. Sadly, threatening to withhold copies of Duke Nukem Forever II proved a surprisingly ineffective threat.

Griping about the “venom” in reviews of Duke Nukem Forever, PR firm the Redner Group says it might stop sending review copies of games to the publications in question. It ends up having to apologize for the threat and is fired by 2K, the game’s publisher.

July

22. Bad Revue.

Logitech says the failure of the lackluster software platform known as Google TV has cost it tens of millions of dollars, and that sales of its Google TV-based Revue box are “negative“–apparently meaning that more of them are being returned than sold.

23. You can’t miss it–it’s right in between the fake Sunglass Hut and the place selling counterfeit Cinnabons.

A blogger visiting Kunming, China visits an “Apple Store” that turns out to be an elaborate fraud–from the tasteful wooden tabletops to the spiral staircase to the name tags worn by employees. It and another faux store are soon shut down by Chinese officials.

24. Ungrateful Netflix customers unfairly resent perfectly reasonable massive price hike.

Netflix changes its pricing policies in ways that impose much higher prices on many customers: a $9.99 plan now costs $16.98. Its cryptic blog post on the changes gets more than 12,000 comments. Very few of them are from customers who are delighted by the news. Many say they’re quitting the service; the company goes on to lose 800,000 subscribers in the third quarter alone.

25. Apple losing iPhone prototypes? Sorry, not plausible.

In an incident that doesn’t make the news until September, Apple security employees enter a San Francisco home and search it for a lost iPhone prototype which they believe is inside. The San Francisco Police Department initially denies being involved in the visit, then says that it was; the home’s occupant says he didn’t know the searchers were Apple staffers rather than police officers, and that he wouldn’t have allowed them inside if that had been clear.

Features have proliferated on BlackBerrys as part of RIM’s move to the broader consumer market, and so have the number of models. Since 2007, RIM has introduced 37 models. The company, in a statement, said it did not know how many models were on the market.

The company with the most phones doesn’t win; the ones with the best phones do.

RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis at DevCon.

I don’t mean to be painfully Pollyannaish, but I’m almost glad that RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis didn’t announce any new products or other major news at the keynote during its DevCon conference in San Francisco, which I attended on Tuesday morning. A year ago, at the 2010 edition of the event, he unveiled the PlayBook tablet. I got all excited. When it finally shipped months later, it was tremendously disappointing.

This year, the upcoming products that matter for RIM are the first BlackBerry phones based on the company’s new QNX-based operating system–which Lazaridis did say will be called BBX, and which will presumably come out next year. If RIM had provided a sneak peak at them at DevCon, it wouldn’t have helped matters and might have hurt. All that really matters is that they’re great when they finally come out. Who cares how unfinished versions look in a controlled demo?

DevCon 2011, which continues today, has been mostly devoted to brass-tacks information aimed at people who write software for RIM devices. That’s fine; that’s what developer conferences are for. But I do wish that Lazaridis, or somebody, had laid out RIM’s vision as a company and as a maker of technology products. Instead, he began his keynote by briefly apologizing for last week’s outage and trumpeting some impressive-sounding sales stats. Then he dived right into technical stuff.

It’s pretty apparent what kind of devices Apple wants to make. I get what’s important to Google’s Android folks. Even though Microsoft’s Windows Phone isn’t catching on with consumers, the company has a strategy.

But RIM? I don’t have a clue about what it’s trying to do.

That wasn’t always the case: For years, it thrived in part because it had such clarity of vision. It wanted to build excellent phones centered around reliable e-mail and calendaring that delivered features that businesses cared about. It did. And then the world changed, and RIM failed to change with it.

I tried to piece together the things that Lazaridis and his colleagues and guests showed at the keynote to get a sense of what RIM cares about. The very first demos they did were of fancy 3D games for the PlayBook. There was some classically RIM-like businessy stuff, such as features designed to let a company prevent PlayBook users from cutting and pasting sensitive corporate data into personal e-mail. Lazaridis repeatedly said that QNX is the one way forward for BlackBerry developers–but an Adobe representative showed the PlayBook running AIR apps, and a segment was devoted to the tablet’s Android compatibility. Most of the keynote focused on the PlayBook, but I didn’t come away absolutely confident that RIM is committed to the device for the long term and won’t TouchPad it and return to being a phone-centric outfit.

It was all pretty jumbled. All I could tell was that RIM is afraid to commit to being anything in particular. It wants to do everything. Which isn’t working.

I winced in particular at the emphasis on fancy games. It seems obvious to me that nothing is more important to RIM’s fate than making excellent business devices. I’m not sure why any game enthusiast would choose a PlayBook over an iPad. But the fact that games led off the keynote may mean that RIM believes they’re key to its future of the company’s products.

Unlike many folks–the people I chatted with on Twitter about the keynote as it happened were amazingly cynical–I don’t think it’s dead certain that RIM’s goose is cooked. It’s possible that Lazaridis and co-CEO Balsillie have a strategy that they’re just not talking about yet. Perhaps they realize that the company’s recent history of stoking excitement for products isn’t nearly as important as making them great. They might be finishing up QNX BlackBerries that are so impressive that they don’t want to talk about them just yet for fear that they’ll kill the market for current models. I still believe that one exceptionally good new BlackBerry phone might change everything.

What I don’t understand is why RIM doesn’t seem to think it’s all that important whether anyone understands what it’s up to. In a conference call in June, Lazaridis said “RIM has taken a unique path and the reason why we do things might not always be obvious from the outside.” He’s right. But isn’t it vital that RIM customers, developers, and watchers understand what RIM is doing, and why? Wouldn’t DevCon be the perfect place to educate us? Wouldn’t it have been worth ten minutes at the start of the keynote? If you don’t bother to explain your strategy for making relevant products–or can’t do so–why should anyone believe you have one?

They include:

• SIMS 3 – Electronic Arts
•  Bejeweled – Electronic Arts
• N.O.V.A. – Gameloft
• Texas Hold’em Poker 2 – Gameloft
• Bubble Bash 2 – Gameloft
• Photo Editor Ultimate – Ice Cold Apps
• DriveSafe.ly Pro – iSpeech.org
• iSpeech Translator Pro – iSpeech.org
• Drive Safe.ly Enterprise – iSpeech.org
• Nobex Radio™ Premium – Nobex
• Shazam Encore – Shazam
• Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant – Vlingo

Enterprise customers will also get a month of free tech support.

As I read that list, I suffer from pangs of cognitive dissonance. Corporate E-mail is important stuff, and delivering it reliably is utterly core to RIM’s mission and reputation. Free poker games feel like an off-topic way of making up for an e-mail outage. What would be more appropriate? Well, how about cash?

The timing of the outage and RIM’s response is particularly meaningful, because RIM is holding its developer conference this week in San Francisco. The conference comes after a long jag of lousy PR for the company–not just the outage, but also the dismal PlayBook launch, lukewarm reaction to new BlackBerry hones, and open questioning of the competence of RIM’s co-CEOs. Really, the last time when the company got any good PR was at last year’s DevCon, when the PlayBook was announced.

So let’s look on the bright side: This year’s conference is a great opportunity for RIM to begin a rebound. Maybe it’ll address the outage forthrightly and explain why it won’t happen again. Perhaps it’ll have news about a PlayBook II. It should reveal more about the first BlackBerries that’ll run the QNX operating system. I’ll be in the audience for the keynote, and I’d love to come away feeling good about the future of what was once one of the most innovative and successful companies in technology.

I’m not an expert on e-mail back-end architecture, and it’s possible that BlackBerry’s overall uptime remains excellent. But these sweeping outages have happened before. Isn’t it a major problem for RIM customers who run their own BlackBerry servers that they’re still so dependent on things working properly up in Canada?