Letter from anonymous RIM employee to senior management rips the company, offers suggestions

A senior executive at RIM has written a letter to the Canadian firm's senior management team. The letter's first line, "I have lost confidence," pretty well sums up the way employees of the BlackBerry maker feel, according to the letter writer. The anonymous executive says his goal is not to embarrass RIM, but to help the company regain the top position it used to have in the smartphone indusutry.

Among suggestions made in the letter is that RIM needs to follow Apple's focus on the end user. Instead, the company currently builds devices based on "strategic alignment, partner requests or even legal advice." Saying that while Android will never have the simplicity and elegance that come with building devices using end-to-end software, middleware and hardware, the letter says that BlackBerry has a chance to achieve this with the QNX OS.

Other suggestions include focusing on just a small number of projects at a time while realizing that it is no longer the carriers that RIM needs to kiss up to, it is now the developers that hold the cards. Even this RIM employee notes that, "RIM smartphone apps suck" while comparing the BlackBerry PlayBook to a FisherPrice toy. He also says the BlackBerry SDK platform is like a run down 1990's Ford Explorer while the SDK platform for Apple is like a BMW/M3.

The anonymous RIM executive writes that the current BlackBerry PlayBook ad campaign that points out how the tablet has Adobe Flash while the Apple iPad doesn't, merely shows off things in the PlayBook that differentiate it from Apple's tablet and is an example of lazy marketing. People don't buy product "B" because it has something that product "A" doesn't have. People buy product "B" because they want it and lust after it, he writes. He also says that Canadians are too nice and don't fire people when they should be terminated. As an example, he notes that the RIM employee responsible for the BlackBerry Storm 9530 software debacle when the phone was launched half-baked, is still with the company. He says too many long time employees remain with RIM just because they have been there for some time.

Finally, the unknown author tells RIM's senior management not to let the press get to them while advising them to reach out to employees to get solutions on how to make the company better. He suggests ending the co-CEO position currently given to both Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie and also suggests renaming the company BlackBerry. Will the executives at RIM take this message seriously? The future will let us know.

source: BGR