Congratulations (I think) to my friend Alec Saunders for taking a new role as “VP of Developer Relations and Ecosystem Development” for Research In Motion (RIM), makers of the Blackberry line of mobile devices.
Or perhaps condolences are in order… somehow he has to make developing for the Blackberry sexy again to all the app developers who focus these days on the world of iOS/iPhone/iPad and the Android platform.
Alec certainly has his work cut out for him. As he writes in his post today announcing the news:
Over the last few days I’ve been in San Francisco at the Mobilize conference, and speaking with developers. It’s clear from those conversations that the primary problem we face is lack of support from application developers. My team’s job is to correct that – to win the hearts and minds of mobile developers again.
“Lack of support” probably doesn’t go far enough as a statement. Any of a zillion charts will show you Blackberry’s rapidly declining marketshare (particularly in the US). iPhones are dramatically outselling Blackberries and Apple is poised to launch iPhone 5 / iOS 5 / iCloud next week, pretty much assuring even more of a boost to the iOS platform and developer ecosystem.
On the Android side, recents stats show twice as many people buying Android devices as iPhones… and today’s mega-launch of the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet is going to light an even larger flame under the Android ecosystem.
Plus, add in Microsoft and all they are attempting to do with the Windows Phone platform…
And somehow… in the midst of all of this…
Alec is going to try to get developers excited about developing apps for the Blackberry???
Not just for the Playbook, mind you, but for the traditional Blackberry platforms of “BBOS” and the new QNX platform. As he says in an interview posted on RIM’s Blackberry Developer Blog today:
Developer evangelism is all about personal contact, listening, responding, and educating. We’re going to work very closely with the developer community, expand on support and programs that make it easy and rewarding for developers to create apps, be in the midst of developers to understand their needs and secure a great developer experience, and identify and remove the barriers developers face in supporting our platforms and doing business with us.
It’s a tough task, made even more challenging by RIM’s recent earnings report (or lack thereof), but if anyone has a hope of pulling it off, it’s Alec. He’s an exceptional communicator, marketer and salesman… and brings both a great technical depth and ability to communicate in “regular” language.
I do seriously wish him all the best! I’ve been a long-time fan of the Blackberry, even though I myself changed mine in for an iPhone back in 2008 or so. RIM has done some pretty amazing things in the mobile market, but as Gizmodo recently noted (“How RIM Could Save Itself“), RIM tied itself to the enterprise so tightly that it missed out on the rise of smartphones in the consumer space – and the corresponding move of those “consumer” smartphones back into the enterprise.
What will their future look like? Can they win back developers? Can they make the Blackberry ecosystem sexy again? Can it claw its way back into being a player in the smartphone market?
Alec’s got a challenge before him – and I look forward to seeing what he’ll do!
P.S. Up to join in the challenge? As Alec notes at the bottom of his blog post, he’s hiring developer evangelists…
Other notes about Alec’s new role:
- Jim Courtney at Voice on the Web with a long, thoughtful piece on Alec’s past and what this all means for RIM.
- Andy Abramson at VoIP Watch
Image credit: me. Taken at ITEXPO East 2010 in South Beach, Miami 🙂
Yes, definitely congrats to Alec. I just saw him at Mobilize, interviewed him, and he was pretty stoked about being at RIM. It was time for him to move on from Calliflower as they machine was running itself.
You know what I think is funny about all these market reports, Dan? People are conveniently ignoring a couple of key facts:
1. The BlackBerry market is continuing to grow. Yes, there has been an explosion of smart phone sales, and share of the overall market has been shrinking, but we’re continuing to add new customers. Morgan Stanley reports Apple with 70 million active users and guess what – we have 70 million active users as well, up from 67 million the quarter before. See our latest earnings call to confirm.
2. You can actually money as a developer on Blackberry. I know… it’s a wild and CRAAZY idea 😉 Yankee group published a report on Android Piracy on Sept 7. Included in that report was a chart showing aggregate earnings on AppWorld, Android Market, and the iPhone App Store. BlackBerry App World has seen more dollars of applications sold to developers than Android Market. Think about that! Evans Data is reporting similar numbers, noting that 13% of BlackBerry developers have earned more than $100,000 from app sales through the App World.
What attracted to me to RIM was the fact that for developers there’s this great opportunity. A market as large as Apple’s, where people are making money.
Whoa!
Go, Alec, go go go!! 🙂
PING:
TITLE: Alec Saunders Is A Rock Star In RIM’s Strange New Blackberry 10 Video
BLOG NAME: Disruptive Telephony
Oh… my. As anyone who knows me can attest, it’s extremely hard to render me speechless… but I admit to sitting here this morning staring at the screen with a rather uncomprehending expression on my face and with my mouth…
PING:
TITLE: Can Alec Saunder Woo Developers Back to the Blackberry Platform?
BLOG NAME: Disruptive Telephony
Can he do it? Can he get developers to actually care enough about the Blackberry / Playbook platform to come and build apps? Yesterday my friend Alec Saunders, RIM’s newly minted “VP of Developer Relations and Ecosystem Development”, took to…