Companies get stuck here all of the time.

Just read a very interesting analysis (which seems to really be lacking in so much of what you read on the web (including sometimes here)) on RIM, their BlackBerry suite of products and while they might look good on paper, the writing is on the wall that they have some real issues ahead of them.

I’d highly recommend reading it.

And as one of the ‘restless cattle’, I have to agree with the fundamentals of how it feels to use a BlackBerry.

When I got my Curve — I felt so lucky and I loved it. But since then, it’s become slow, painful to use and I haven’t seen a lot of innovation to make it worth upgrading and locking in another 2 years with VZW.

What would I suggest to fix their platform? It’s not as wide spread as Michael Mace suggests but I think it’s in the same spirit.

1) Fix App World.

The experience totally sucks and after getting an app installed, instead of feeling great and wondering what else I could download/buy like I do in iTunes, I feel like I just went 15 rounds on the heavy bag, my arms are dead and I don’t even want to be using my phone any more.

Discovery. Miserable.

Installing. Painful.

Updates. Not working.

2) Make messaging better

Messaging, what was RIM’s bread and butter has changed drastically over the past 10 years. It’s no longer just email but now SMS, FB, Twitter, etc. And in those messages, it’s no longer just about text — it’s about images.

a) Make it way easier to message to any platform you want faster and better on Blackberry and do not make it feel like a bolt on.

b) Images –

Getting them: don’t make me download them all as attachments one at a time, just get them, I want them. And for all of those who say you can configure, blah blah blah.  Out of the box.  This is how a BlackBerry should work, not how it can be configured to work.

Sending them: Almost brings my BB to my knees and it doesn’t work well. Fix it.

3) App Mgmt and Thrash.

Make it easier to move, manage, delete the apps I have. Make configuring them make sense rather than look like a DOS prompt and if an App is thrashing and killing my battery — help me identify that and kill it.

c)

I mentioned a while back ‘WTF‘ was going on over at NBC back when they couldn’t get their glasses on straight enough to figure out that they were blowing it with Conan O’Brien.

Then he had an epic last show that was absolutely phenomenal and since then — Conan O’Brien has been lighting the entire world wide web on fire.

Now, he’s going to crowd source his first guest (or at least get tons of buzz pretending to)! Amazing. So a show that was so stuck on the blade due to NBC seemingly holding it down there under the guise of  ‘protecting’ rather than refreshing the ‘Tonight Show’ brand.

Conan is rocking the blade and ready to slay late night TV.

Is email marketing SOTB?  It must be given that my inbox is completely flooded with email not only from amazon.com but from a prince from Africa who wants my bank account information to deposit a zillion dollars.  There’s a difference between email marketing that you want and email marketing that just gets sent.  DailyCandy and Thrillist are great examples of marketing that you want but the challenge (and a common theme on SOTB) is separating the signal from the noise in your inbox.  We just scan our inbox and look for email that is relevant and skip/filter everything else rarely deleting anything. So who’s going to invent the “smart inbox”? The inbox that detects the pattern of what you read or click and then auto-puts those emails on the top of the stack in the future.  Everything else goes into the “read later” zone. Mister Zero or Pink please make this.

Typically, I try and stay away from posting on the weekend, but this just seemed right.  Unfortunately, you know what’s stuck on the blade? The World Trade Center site.  I know this is a very sensitive issue, but it is true. There is no way that in any of the rebuilding presentations and plans that were presented in the years after this horrible tragedy said 9 years down the road, we would be so far from rebuilding, and that’s hurting us in so many ways.

For the folks that lost someone — they are stuck coming back to the same day with not enough progress.

And for the rest of us, there is nothing positive to rally behind and help out those who are still really hurting from the loss of a loved one.

And to put it into context, go back to September 10, 1992.  Do you remember what you were doing that day? Regardless, even if that day was a horrible one for you personally, perhaps even more horrible that Sept 11th, 2001, you probably had healed better and further along in those 9 years that we have in the past 9.

Hola. I’ve been summering well, but just caught this video on CNET TV today.

I was calling this issue with the Android ecosystem for 6 8 months now.  Great to see my views hitting the big time media market on CNET TV.