Giving Up on Blackberry

Greg Herlein is Ditching Blackberry - Hello Siri:

I just reserved an iPhone 4S for pickup tomorrow.  I plan to turn off my Blackberry.  Of course, my day job only supports the ancient, slowly dying behemoth that is RIM.  Oh well.  I’ll pay extra for the tethering option and use my notebook to access work email over VPN.  Frankly, it’s better than paying the same dollars for an Enterprise Blackberry plan that gives me access to corporate email and an increasingly sucky mobile computing experience.  Today I swapped twitter clients, trying a new one.  And had to reboot my phone each time.  What?  Really?  A REBOOT to delete an app?  Come on RIM, what century are we in?   And which twitter clients do you support?  Seriously?  Did you fall off a cliff?  Oh, wait… you did.  What developer in their right mind would still support Blackberry?

I’m not some young kid demanding only the latest with no appreciation for the past.  I learned cobol on punch cards.  I coded my first program on a TRS-80 with 4K of RAM (yes, you young punks, there once was a computer that small).  The first computer I bought with my own money was an Osbourne.  I still remember how excited I was that Linux was ported to the Zaurus.  But I’ve also written Android code and published a game for the iPhone (MultiAlien).  The world has moved on, and fast.  It’s about the web.  It’s about modern operating systems.  My expectations are that modern vendors follow the curve.  I’d still be chasing Android if Google had not risked the livelihood of their whole ecosystem with their ignorance of Intellectual Property rights (which means that Larry will get an even better boat for the next America Cup race).  The only reason RIM has a market at all is that they have tentacles into corporate IT email.  When that is gone…  the company value plummets to NOTHING.  I’m serious.  They have NOTHING that I want.  And when that cliff hits…  you don’t want to have a Blackberry.  And I have carried a Blackberry for 7 years.  Until tomorrow.