∞ RIM has to rearchitect entire system to get email on PlayBook

Written by

RIM co-CEO Jim Balsille publicly stated that email was not a core component that its customers wanted on the PlayBook. We all knew that was hogwash, but now the real reason has come out.

[ad#Google Adsense 300x250 in story]It turns out that RIM couldn’t have included email on the PlayBook if it wanted to — I maintain that they would want to if they could. Quoting a source who is a director of product management at RIM, Business Insider claims the BlackBerry email system can’t handle more than one user at a time.

When the BlackBerry email system was built, there were no thoughts of tablets, so the concept on a user wanting more than one login never occurred to RIM.

“So now it has significant work to make the BES support multiple devices,” according to the source.

I still maintain that RIM should have seen this coming at least a few years ago and could have planned ahead instead of stumbling around like they have been for the past year or so.


  • DocRoss

    Do you mean “email was *not* a core component”?

  • Ottawaman

    I think you meant “…wasn’t a core component” right?

  • http://twitter.com/shankariyer Shankar Radhakrishna

    “so the concept on a user wanting more than one login never occurred to RIM.”

    What does that mean ? I am missing something here. From a Blackberry Phone today, you can check emails from multiple accounts anyways.

    • Anonymous

      I take it to mean they can’t make BES such that you can check your BES email from multiple devices. Which is kind of odd?! Even if BES doesn’t do that right now I can’t imagine it would be very hard to add, and it would be all server side?!

  • Cableguy

    This level of stupid is hard to even conceive. Imagine how stupid RIM would be if they had three CEO’s.

  • http://mangochut.net/ mangochutney

    So instead of saying the truth, telling current and prospective customers that email will come to the PlayBook, but in order to provide the best possible experience, it’s going to take some time and extensive modifications on RIM’s side, they lied and clouded everything in marketing-speak.

    As a RIM customer I’d be pissed, because this would give me the feeling that RIM thinks I’m stupid and cannot handle the truth/technical details. It’s a dick move.

  • Anonymous

    “a user wanting more than one login”

    It would be more accurate to say “[..] a user wanting to access a BB account from more than one device [...]“.

  • lvidal

    So, ironically they don’t support a basic feature like multiple logins for email at multiple devices, but do have two CEO’s and three COO’s instead of a monolithic figure like it should be.

  • Anonymous

    Whatever the technical details here may be – the problem with BB is that it’s run by marketing people. Sooner or later their lack of technical competence will come and bite them in the behind.

    The problem with the marketing people is they don’t even know they have a problem on the technical side until it’s way too late, until they’re literally years behind, until it’s all lost. That happened to both BB and Nokia, and they are left to pick up the pieces. 

    Google is an engineering company – they understand that in order to make good products, you need the best techs money can buy – not only that you also need technical people in upper management. 

  • Anonymous

    There is one important point you miss. RIM could not have included it’s fully secure Blackberry email on the playbook, but it could put email clients on the playbook that are less secure (and equivalent to anything you find on any other tablet). 

    So in some sense there was still a choice not to include email. Now we can argue about whether that was the right choice. I think it was the right choice, the wrong choice is to delay having other email clients for it in App world since we know they have been written. RIM is too obsessed with security.