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My Bold Predictions for 2013

Leave a Comment Posted by on January 2, 2013

Happy New Year! Alrighty, now that I’ve judged myself on my Bold Predictions for 2012 (and done not so badly overall though always with room for improvement), it’s time to spit em’ out for 2013. I’m hung over, have a sore back, haven’t slept and oh yeah, have to head back to what will be an insane merger-induced grind tomorrow so I’m actually not in a blogging mood but dammit, predictions must flow! I’m going to try to put in everything I can think of before posting this but I do these kind of off-the-cuff and with no pre-planning so I am going to reserve the right to add to the post for up to 48 hours after publishing it in case I remember anything. These are also tech and gaming predictions. I have predictions in the economic and political arenas too but these will be long enough and frankly, I don’t have the time or the energy for political arguments.

And away we go!

Gaming

  • THQ’s new private equity owner will ensure all their games in the pipe come out but the company will be split up and sold off shortly after. This is honestly a shame because despite the absolute idiocy of that company’s management (Jason Rubin being very much an exception), they’ve managed to keep a lot of talent and put out some pretty good games. That said, the AAA industry is in a state of massive flux right now (more on that later) and even the big boys can’t figure out how to reliably succeed in it so I can’t see who would want to fund another go for THQ in that arena. There’s a lot of mystery around this eleventh hour deal but from what I’ve read, it looks like vultures who want to ring out whatever profits they can from the nearly finished games in the pipe and then sell the studios and IP for some additional profit. I hope I’m wrong but I don’t think I am.
  • Mobile gaming will continue to grow but the honeymoon is over. This is kind of an extension of a prediction from last year but I’m declaring it to have a bigger effect this year. I’ve banged on about how the meteoric growth of this industry (and the companies whose platforms it runs on) is a fashion trend, that the growth is unsustainable and that a big equalisation adjustment is coming as it already has in the social space. Mobile has quickly been usurped by big companies and the only games that are attaining mass scale success are from big companies with the occasional fluke like Angry Birds was. It’s a super hit driven industry just like AAA is and the press will no longer be able to ignore that as they’ve been doing for a while now. This type of gaming’s not going anywhere and that’s a good thing but this is the year reality hits and people realise it isn’t all milk, honey and guaranteed riches. Mobile will continue to exist and thrive but it’s not going to replace other ways of gaming any time soon if ever. To tie into this…
  • The general public will start to tire of free-to-play Skinner Box mechanics. This right here is why I can’t stand most mobile games. Everything’s filled with microtransactions, nags to spend money and a damn store front between every level, whether it makes design sense or not. It’s a terrible, exploitive way to design games, I hate it and I’ve already heard more than a few other people who are tired of it too. When people look at their credit card statements and realise those 5 $0.99 games they bought actually cost more like $25 in total in order to make them good and not just grind fests, they get frustrated and I think we’ll see more of that. This mechanic isn’t going away but I do think we’re going to start seeing mobile games that offer complete experiences for a higher price.
  • The WiiU will be a modest success. I’m sure Nintendo realises that much like mobile is now, the Wii’s growth was fashion driven and I’m sure they have no such expectations with the WiiU and have budgeted accordingly. I got one of these for Christmas and despite some dumb decisions they made (largely regarding patch structure, DRM and the GamePad’s battery, all of which can be fixed), this is an amazing platform that offers a lot of promise and uniqueness. This isn’t a Wii with a low-rent tablet attached and anyone who thinks so is either uninformed or more likely an Apple fanboy. I still don’t see Nintendo winning over third parties in a big way with this but as always, their own stunning developer talent will carry the WiiU to profitability.
  • The Vita will go from limping to crawling. Naming the Vita one of my disappointments of 2012 hurt because I love this thing so much. It’s incredible hardware and it’s a steal at $250 and it shows how you can do good portable gaming without compromise but no one’s making games for it. Even when they’re hurting bad though, Sony’s not one to throw in the towel and I don’t think they will here. They’ll keep pushing it and I do believe it will continue to sell small numbers and probably will never be a runaway success but I do think it will advance enough this year to keep owners like myself in some decent content. I also believe Sony’s next home system will give it a big push but more on that later.
  • Console shovelware is dead. It’s already happening and good bloody riddance! The Wii and DS were kind of the last bastions for the vulture publishers who make their living cranking out cheap, garbage games for $30-$40 in the hopes of catching suckers at Wal-Mart. The increased development costs of the new systems (which many believe to be 2-3x what they are now at a minimum) will make this slimy practice an impossible model. These publishers won’t simply move to mobile either because there’s already too much garbage in that space and because they were run by scummy businesspeople who didn’t really understand the industry as a whole, they won’t know how to adapt to the realities of the mobile market and will likely just up and die off. They deserve to rot.
  • The first major Kickstarter disaster will happen and will test people’s faith in the crowdfunding model. I think this model of funding games is brilliant and I spent way too much on Kickstarters this year. However, at least one of these projects is either not going to come out and zero out everybody’s “investment” or it will come out, be far below the majority’s expectations and people will feel ripped off. There have just been too many projects and a big portion of those are fuelled by rose-tinted nostalgic expectations. I know I’m probably going to hate at least a couple of the finished projects that I backed. No disrespect to Brian Fargo and I so hope Wasteland 2 is killer but inXile’s track record is not good. The Peter Molyneux and David Braben projects are also just gross and while perfectly legit, abuse the Kickstarter spirit in my opinion. The thing is, I fully knew what I was getting into when I backed them and the whole point of Kickstarter and that you roll the dice and take your chances. Most people don’t know that though or they say they do but don’t really mean it. When one of these games comes out to poor reviews or worse yet, doesn’t come out at all, a lot of people are going to feel burned and run away from crowdfunding. The people that do get it will continue to make it a viable means of indie development which is awesome but much like mobile, we’re still in the honeymoon phase.
  • The OUYA will come out and find niche success. I don’t really think the OUYA folks believe this is going to be the thing that overtakes Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo but I also think the fanboy press who largely hated on this thing not because of it’s ideas but because it’s Android and called it no less than a scam were dead wrong. None of them will do the right thing and eat crow of course but I didn’t expect it as such. Developer kits for this have already shipped whereas the press’ golden boy project I’ll talk about next is delayed until March, maybe. There seems to be a lot of developer hype for this and I think it’s a really cool idea. I actually backed it but had to reduce my pledge due to money issues but if this makes it to market, I’ll happily grab one to try it out.
  • The Oculus Rift will come out late and underwhelm. The same press outlets who have been dumping on OUYA have used such fashionable terms as “the future” to describe this thing. I think it’s very cool and if it does what it does well and gets game support, I’ll totally get one. However, all attempts at virtual reality have proven cumbersome and not generally worth the experience and I’ve seen nothing to indicate this will be otherwise. I do think this could find niche success but I think the press’ own hype of this will be to its detriment when normal consumers start getting their hands on it. I’ll be happy to be wrong about this.
  • Layoffs, studios closures and the viability of AAA development will be a bigger story than ever. This was one of the dominating themes of 2012 and as we go through yet another year waiting for new consoles, I think it’s only going to get worse. Sales are falling (no one’s 100% sure of why but many think it’s not just the normal end-of-cycle downturn), costs are set to skyrocket and anything that isn’t a sure fire hit is a recipe for financial catastrophe. Any studio that hasn’t consistently pumped out critical and commercial successes can’t get work anymore and we now have fewer publishers able to fund new AAA projects than ever before. I love AAA gaming and it pains me greatly to see it in such decline but unless people get bored of mobile games and come running back to it, I don’t see how they fix this going forward. My hope is that this is an adjustment and the industry will realign itself and come out stronger but that requires new players to enter the space and no one is.
  • Valve’s Steam box will not release this year but will enter the promised beta phase. My feeling is it will be a standardised PC design that runs customised Linux with Steam on it. And for that reason, I will probably not care because it will have a fraction of my library available to me and most of it is going to be indie stuff I don’t need to play on my TV or that I can play by running an HDMI cable from my laptop. Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a cool idea and from the way they’ve talked about it being able to run competing software, it might even be Valve’s own attempt at an OUYA-like thing which could be something special indeed.
  • Steam on Linux will remain niche at best. Despite the hypocrisy of Valve and others towards Windows 8, I do get where some of their concerns are rooted and I share them. However, to think Linux is going to ever gain mainstream adoption of any kind, especially gaming at this stage is a pipe dream. Even the versions of it that are designed to be “desktop friendly” are a nightmare to maintain, drivers are a mess and the community as a whole is still full of elitists who drive the mainstream away and like it that way. All that’s fine, I’ve got nothing against any of that if that’s the way you want a platform to be but all of those things mean it will never take over Windows. Kudos to Valve for making a concerted effort to make the platform viable for gaming and I do hope they can succeed in some way. But if they do, it won’t be for a long time to come.
  • Cross-media gaming will be attempted multiple times and never take off. Frank Gibeau from EA as well as babbling heads like Kevin Dent say that big gaming franchises have to have components everywhere. Beyond your console or PC game, there has to be a tie-in product on your phone, your tablet, your browser and anywhere else in order to keep you engaged at all times. I think this is a dumb idea and a waste of developer talent and resources. EA tried it with Mass Effect 3 and all the tie-in content sucked and no one really cared as far as I can tell. I won’t talk about this too much here because I have a future blog post about it planned.
  • There will be no new games announced or released from Valve this year (Dota 2 excepted). Forget Half-Life 2: Episode 3, we will get zilch from them in 2013. Between their new hardware experiment, Steam for Linux and whatever else, they aren’t going to be in a rush to put anything out. I excepted Dota 2 from this because it’s technically out to anyone who wants it already but it may exit beta.
  • DayZ standalone will launch late and be a buggy, hacker ridden mess like all Bohemia Interactive launches. Don’t get me wrong, I think the ideas of DayZ are absolutely fantastic, even if I burned out on the game after a month and I respect Bohemia as a developer a ton for finding a super tight niche and thriving in it. But the fact remains that their launch track record is abysmal and I don’t expect that to change with the standalone DayZ game. I hope they buck the trend this time because they might have the birth of a new genre on their hands and they’d be foolish to burn it right at the start.

Next-Gen Consoles

This gets its own section because there’s just too much to talk about regarding the next Xbox and PlayStation. There’s no doubt in my mind that these machines will be radically different from anything that’s come before. They have to be because making themselves stand out against phones and tablets (for better or worse) is a must.

  • Both the next Microsoft and Sony systems will be announced and shipped this year. Rumour is the next Xbox was supposed to come out in 2012 and got delayed for major retooling. The industry can’t wait any more, new hardware has to happen this year or there will be no one left to make stuff for it.
  • Both platforms will use far fewer specialised parts and be more like PCs than ever. It’s cheaper, most of the off-the-shelf parts are more powerful and most importantly, it’s much easier and faster to develop for. The days of Cell processors and weird memory allocation issues are over, they have to be. I’m guessing each system will have a minimum of 4GB RAM and hard drives will be standard but not SSDs.
  • Both platforms will offer every title in every tier for sale digitally on day one. Sony’s already trying this with select PS3 games. We’ve reached a tipping point where despite the telecartel’s best efforts, broadband is becoming a viable way to get large content and video game retail is losing its stranglehold on publishers and platform holders. By selling games digitally, the useless middleman who rips off the industry and consumers with used games gets cut out, pricing flexibility and sales are easy obtained and everyone makes more money. Retail is the only reason this wasn’t done before and Microsoft and Sony realise it’s time to throw caution to the wind and just do it. Whether I embrace this depends on whether they do DRM intelligently. They can look to Nintendo for how not to do it.
  • Free-to-play will become a big deal on consoles. Again, Sony tried this first with DUST 514 and Microsoft tried it with an XBLA title that wasn’t very good. However, they both know how much money there is to be made here, Sony especially since free-to-play is where Sony Online Entertainment makes most of its money now. The ability to handle microtransactions will exist at the system level and seamlessly integrate into both platform’s store front systems. For this to work though, another major change must happen and that is…
  • Console certification processes will continue to exist but will significantly lighten and be sped up. Free-to-play titles live and die on how quickly they can iterate. PlanetSide 2 has probably had a dozen or more patches since it left beta and it’s a better game for it. If each of those patches required weeks of sitting in certification limbo, it would have been disastrous. One of the big complaints from developers big and small over the last year has been how expensive and unnecessarily burdensome the console certification process is. Given that numerous games still ship completely broken or in some cases unfinished, it’s clearly not working as it is. Games shouldn’t have to wait weeks to make sure they prompt you to select your storage device and specifically tell you “Don’t turn off your console” when they’re saving data. I don’t know enough about the current processes to know how they will be streamlined but this must and will happen.
  • SmartGlass will be a big deal for Xbox and Vita integration will be big for PlayStation. Being able to have your console content interact with your phone or tablet is largely a dumb gimmick right now but Nintendo is showing how you can do it in unique and interesting ways. Microsoft will expand their SmartGlass platform to make this a much bigger (yet still optional) component of the gaming and media experience on Xbox. I believe Sony has plans to do something similar but on a more unique scale with the Vita due to the things it offers that phones and tablets can’t. I don’t know if tightly integrating the Vita into the home PlayStation experience can save the platform but I really hope it breathes new life into it.
  • Motion gaming is over. The Kinect was a fad and it’s largely dried up and almost no one’s making games for it any more, certainly nothing with a decent budget. Move died even quicker. The public’s got over motion gaming and I don’t think putting it in the box with the next systems is going to make it popular again. No matter how precise you make it, it’s still not the best way to play games. The next Xbox might support the current Kinect but I don’t think we’ll see another one.
  • Like PC, AAA games will be only a single segment of the gaming experiences available on consoles. This industry simply can’t afford to focus on AAA content exclusively, especially since costs and risks are only going to get more insane. But variety is good and despite some incredible gems coming out of console downloadable services (including half of my top 10 games of 2012), there’s really only the AAA stuff and the high-end downloadable stuff. I believe that free-to-play and a newly refocused effort on promoting and fostering smaller indie development, consoles are suddenly going to have the wide variety of game types, production values and price points that you could previously only get on PC and on mobile to a lesser extent. I think this is going to be the single biggest paradigm shift in the history of the console industry and it’s sorely overdue. This is what’s going to keep it relevant against up and coming platforms.
  • Sony will offer backwards compatibility via their Gaikai acquisition at some point but likely not at launch. They bought that company to probably eventually make PlayStation a platform that isn’t dependant on hardware but for now, I could see them using it this way since the rumoured radical hardware changes in the next console will likely make built-in backwards compatibility impossible. I don’t know if you’ll buy individual games or a subscription service or maybe some kind of hybrid tied into PlayStation Plus. Personally, I’d happy pay a few bucks a month to get access to a huge PS2 and PSP library. I do sincerely hope people who made PSN purchases on PS3 will get automatic Gaikai versions. I’m not counting on it though.
  • Microsoft will not offer retail game backwards compatibility but will offer it for certain XBLA titles like the 360 does with original Xbox games. I don’t think they want to risk pissing off people who will lose access to everything XBLA but they also aren’t going to go through the headache of making every game work. Most XBLA titles never pushed the 360′s processing power very hard so in theory, software backwards compatibility could be enough for most of those titles. I imagine they will also keep the 360 on sale and the Live system for that system up and running for a while.
  • PC gaming will keep getting bigger and challenge the notion of whether many hardcore gamers even need a console. Due to the PC-like architecture rumoured to be powering the new systems, making quality PC ports will be easier than ever and with that goes the reason many PC gamers had for also owning a console. If I could be assured that the majority of AAA PC ports were well done and more like they’ve been in the last year, I’d seriously consider only buying the next consoles when they were cheaper for exclusives.

Technology

  • The Apple fashion trend will finally begin to normalise but the press will ignore it. I’ll say it again before fanboys lose their minds: This does not mean I think Apple’s going away. They aren’t and despite being a mean-spirited, greedy company riding a choreographed public and press perception, it’s a very good thing that they’re around. However, between market saturation, maturing competition and people realising that a lot of their products are underpowered, overpriced and riding hype and form rather than function, their growth is going to start to go from bubble to something more realistic. This is what happens with bubbles. Their stock price has already slid 25% in 2012 but you know how many stories about it I’ve seen from the numerous tech sites I follow? Zero, even though many of these sites live blog their earnings calls. There’s a trend in modern media to build people or companies up high and then kick them back down but that’s never how it’s worked with Apple. They always get a huge free pass that others don’t and I think that’s going to continue. The market’s waking up though and whether fanboys like it or not, a lot of people still don’t use Apple products and many more realise their stuff isn’t necessarily the best at everything.
  • The Apple television is not coming. I made this prediction last year but the rumour won’t die so I’m reserving the right to make it again. Nearly everyone who is big in the TV business is bleeding to death right now. The HDTV market is saturated with people who see no compelling reason to upgrade. Paying 30-50% more for a screen with an Apple logo and the guts of a $99 Apple TV box (especially when many already have iPads you can plug into any TV) is simply not going to happen. Steve Jobs had one line in his biography where he said he’d figured out how to innovate in the TV space. Only for Apple does that one throwaway bit of information lead to an endless stream of speculation on how they’ll somehow revolutionise the TV space. It’s not going to happen.
  • The iPhone 5S will be the next model but in the Fall, not the Spring. Many think that after Apple burned their hardcore by announcing a newer iPad only six months after the previous one that the same thing would start happening with the iPhone too. Aside from the fact that iPhone sales are down because the 5 doesn’t offer anything worth upgrading for, the 6 month iPad debacle was I think just an experiment to see how far they can push people. I don’t think they’re going to keep doing that.
  • BlackBerry 10 will sustain RIM, not catapult them forward. By all accounts, it’s a fantastic operating system and their stock has been reflecting the buzz. The problem is that all 3 of the other major mobile platforms all tie into something bigger. iOS ties into Apple, Android ties into Google’s many services and Windows Phone ties into PCs. All RIM has is mobile and that’s going to make things tougher for them. I imagine that it’s extreme manageability, security features and flexibility will still make it the ideal corporate platform and most of their current corporate and government base will continue using them, as will a niche group of others. But their previous leadership was too short sighted to see the consumer battle approaching and they’ve lost it. I think they’ll refocus on what they have and serving that well.
  • PC sales will slide a bit as the industry normalises but the slide will not be huge and it will settle. While I think tablets are a horrible way to do anything but the lightest computing tasks, there’s a big segment of the population that only has to do the lightest tasks. Those people are buying tablets instead of PCs and with good reason. In addition, a weakening global economy means enterprise spending is slowing across the board and that’s where a lot of PC sales come from. The PC will be the dominant computing platform for the foreseeable future, anyone who says otherwise is clueless. But the industry has been red hot for too long and some cooling should happen. I hope this will thing out some of the garbage vendors and maybe stop the race to the bottom for a while.
  • Windows 8 will sell well below expectations. I think the hyperbolic hate for Windows 8 is way overblown but I get and share some of the big concerns about it. I’ve used it but not full-time and at some point soon, I will be upgrading my gaming rig to it so I can properly judge for myself. Depending on who you ask, it’s either selling OK or worse than Vista which was a dud as Windows sales go and for good reason, it was garbage. Some sales softness can be attributed to slowing PC sales but there has rightly or wrongly been some poison injected into the mainstream consciousness about Windows 8. Microsoft’s been desperate to chase the anti-choice, closed ecosystem model that Apple made popular and I think that’s stupid. They should be running the other way, embracing the opposite side and evangelising that. I believe that the poor sales of Windows 8 and the Surface tablets will cause them to re-evaluate what they’re doing with Windows and maybe back off or make optional some of what people hate about it.
  • Windows Phone 8 will rise to a respectable market share. I was wrong about this last year with Windows Phone 7 but my girlfriend is in love with WP8, as is everyone who buys a phone with it. There’s been lost of buzz slowly building about it and when the platform launched in China, it sold out everywhere in 2 hours, far outpacing the iPhone 5, even though it also set a record. Android is decimating all right now and that’s not going to change, nor are a sizable number of Apple faithful going to jump ship. But there’s still a big market out there of people who don’t own smartphones or who want to switch away from BlackBerry or older Android devices and I think there’s a big chance for Windows Phone there. After playing with my girlfriend’s Lumia 920, it makes my BlackBerry 9900 look last century and if I could afford a new phone tomorrow, it’s without question the one I would get.
  • The TV industry will make a new push from 3D TVs to 2K or 4K TVs. I said we would see no mention of 2K/4K TVs last year and I was right, as I was about 3D dying off. However, the Japanese TV manufacturers are bleeding out fast and they need something, anything to resuscitate their fortunes. I don’t think the market is ready for 2K/4K yet but damned if they aren’t going to try to make it ready.
  • Sharp will go bankrupt and Panasonic will have a massive restructuring. Whether Sharp goes the Japanese equivalent of Chapter 11 or Chapter 7 I don’t know but there’s no way for them to recover from the death spiral they’re in. Panasonic is already talking about shedding Sanyo and I think that’s only the tip of the iceberg for them. Sony is well underway with it’s restructuring now but Panasonic’s going to announce some kind of similar radical plan that will involve much deeper cuts due to them not being as diversified as Sony.
  • We will start to see more mainstream PCs come standard with SSDs or a combination of SSD and hard drive. SSDs have gotten so incredibly cheap that it’s becoming worth it for PC manufacturers to put them in medium-class models just to boast about how fast they are. There are even low-end SSDs that are so inexpensive, they could even make it into some of the cheap big box systems.

And after another epic length post, there’s all my predictions for 2013! There’s a lot of uncertainty in not only the tech and gaming industries but in the world in general. Still, I think there’s a lot to look forward to and I’m very curious to see what lies ahead. I hope your 2012 was good to you and yours and that your 2013 will be even better. I’m very stoked for a lot of things coming in my life this year and may only my good predictions be the right ones. Happy New Year once again!

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Revisiting My Bold Predictions for 2012

1 Comment Posted by on December 31, 2012

The end of 2012 is upon us. Personally, it’s been a Hell of a year, not just in the industries I observe with interest but for me in general. My girlfriend passed the UFE and will be a Chartered Accountant in a few months, we moved from our small apartment into a house (still renting though), we got a puppy and my company reverse merged with another company, went public as a result and changed it’s 30+ year name in the process. And that’s just a bit of it. It was very good overall though and I think 2013′s going to be even better! Before I make my bold predictions for the new year, I must of course revisit those I made for the year that’s just ending. Go here to find them as I will only mention their titles here and more in-depth explanations are included in the original post. I’m going to ape a neat system the crew at Gamers With Jobs came up with and rate how accurate I was in terms of a score. I made 30 predictions (29 “real” ones and 1 joke) so that’s the total the score can be. If I was mostly or totally right on a prediction, I get 1 point. If I was half-right or had some critical information wrong but the gist was accurate, I get half a point. And finally, if I was dead wrong, I get zilch. I’m also only scoring the bolded parts which are the actual predictions, not the additional details which are just general thoughts. This is scored by me of course but hey, this ain’t scientific or nothin’. I will try to judge myself honestly. :)

Off we go!

Gaming

  • THQ will manage to secure additional investment or credit but this will be their last gasp at survival before they run out of cash (half point.) As far as I know, they didn’t get additional money, they were just able to tap a line of credit they hadn’t used. They still ran out of cash and declared bankruptcy just recently, being swept up by a private equity firm. Danny Bilson left but Brian Farrell’s still around and his long-term future there is still unknown.
  • GSC Game World’s upcoming news will be that the company is indeed dead (1 point.) The company still exists but has no staff so it’s basically dead. A new studio did in fact start up with the old staff but they’re making a free-to-play online game in a S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-like universe but not with the actual IP which they couldn’t secure. A bit of a battle has started up between the remnants of GSC and bitComposer Games over the IP.
  • The 3DS will continue to sell well at the current price point and the Vita will not do the numbers Sony wants but will do enough to keep the platform afloat (1 point.) I was right on about the 3DS and not fully on the Vita but I’m calling it a win because while it did underperform, Sony keeps saying they’re backing it going forward and there are games coming, though not many. I so hope the Vita can find it’s footing.
  • The successor to the Xbox 360 will be announced at E3 and the PS4 will be teased only (0 points.) No other way to say it, I was wrong, wrong, wrong. This is the year both will be announced but I won’t make a prediction on that specifically because it’s too obvious.
  • The WiiU will get a price and a ship date in the holiday quarter (1 point.) Bang on, though this wasn’t exactly a stretch. They also did solve the problem of multiple tablets but in a half-assed way that’s not close to ready yet. I think the launch lineup was OK and it’s been selling out but talk has been soft so it’s too early to tell how it’s doing.
  • The wonderful trend of analysts either talking less or the gaming press finally realising they’re not worth listening to will continue (0 points.) Why oh why couldn’t I have been right about this? It seemed like the enthusiast press was finally over leeching clicks off these hacks but they’re doing it as much as ever with even more analysts (and even purposefully obscure hacks like Dent and industry failures like Broussard) beaking off in the press all the time. This is a scourge that needs to stop.
  • This is the year where the realities of mobile development  start to become clear in the development community (1 point.) This didn’t happen to the degree I expected it to but I’m calling it a win because it has already started. Multiple promising mobile developers have died this year, largely because they foolishly believed the mobile gold rush meant nobody could fail. I’ll flesh this out more with my 2013 predictions.
  • Many Facebook developers will continue to struggle or in the case of the big boys like Zynga, show themselves to be grossly overvalued and not as big a money press as once thought (1 point.) Nailed it! Zynga’s in a death spiral, Facebook itself has a disastrous fraud-filled year and we haven’t heard a peep in months about a big new social startup. A lot of this is because most Facebook games don’t work on mobile platforms and that’s increasingly where Facebook usage is going. This field isn’t going away but much like mobile, it’s getting kicked in the face by reality instead of hype.
  • AAA publishers that are not Activision will keep losing money and AAA developers will continue to be hit-or-die (1 point.) Nailed again but again, I wish I was wrong. Most of the few AAA publishers left are either losing money or just squeaking out modest profits whereas Activision is still sucking the marrow from Blizzard and Call of Duty. Numerous developers went under this year and almost all of those can be tied to the failure of a single title. This is a dark time to be in AAA and it makes me sad.
  • Diablo III will come out some time this year and it will be a huge hit but not as big a one as Blizzard or Bobby Kotick thinks (half point.) It did come out and was a huge hit but as far as I know, it’s done extremely well. It’s up to something like 7 million sales now and despite being basically broken, the real money auction house is generating revenue. I do think that part is doing worse than Blizzard wanted but I don’t think they’re disappointed with the money the game’s made.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic will experience a sharp drop in subscribers (1 point.) Bang on. They flailed about trying out a trial model, then went to a horrible exploitive free-to-play system and by many accounts, this detonated the upper echelons of BioWare. I actually think it’s a good game, it just came out at the wrong time with a foolish business model.
  • John Riccitiello’s leadership at EA will be strongly challenged (0 points.) There were rumblings in the press that he was in trouble but nothing public happened.
  • Free-to-play will start to really shine this year in non-Asian RPG ways (1 point.) Oh yes! One of my top 10 games of the year is free-to-play and I’ve got like 5 or 6 of them installed on my PC right now. Not all of them do it right (particularly on mobile platforms) but those that do are making great games and best as I can tell, tidy profits too.
  • Half-Life 2: Episode 3/Half-Life 3 will not release this year (1 point.) Is anyone really surprised? I know Valve’s way of doing business means this won’t happen until they feel like it but seriously guys, enough is enough. This series made you a success and your fans are owed closure.
  • Highly intrusive DRM schemes on PC games will be scaled back, though DRM in general will still be an issue (1 point.) Ubisoft dropped their always-on DRM (though activations are still needed) but Diablo III embraced the horrible practice with both hands, which caused highly publicised launch nightmares. It’s definitely a lessening trend though which I am very happy to see.
  • I may potentially buy an iPad 3 to try out iOS gaming (half point.) I split a used iPad 2 with my girlfriend which is why I call this a halfsie because I did specifically say iPad 3. Overall, I’ve been very disappointed. iOS uses dated design and most mobile games that I’ve tried have been terrible. I was wrong about the iPad 3 having Retina too, they totally figured that out. If I even need a tablet of my own any time soon, it will either be Windows 8 Pro or Android.
  • SECTION SCORE: 11.5/16

Technology

  • Apple will not release a branded television (1 point.) I can’t believe I’m seemingly one of the only people who didn’t think this was obvious. There is no market for a TV that will end up costing 30-50% more (which it will have to for it to have the margins Apple wants) but which just has the guts of an Apple TV box you can buy for $99. One line from Jobs’ biography where he says he “cracked it” means exactly squat.
  • This is the year Android tablets finally become competitive (0.5 points.) I’m calling this a halfsie because while Android tablet sales are up significantly (particularly with the introduction of the Nexus tablets), the iPad still dominates the tablet market and from what I can tell, most Android apps are still made for phones exclusively or primarily. It’s getting better but it’s still not the competitor it needs to be.
  • Research In Motion will finally remove Balsillie and Lazaridis from their leadership roles at the company (1 point.) BOOM! Most of my secondary predictions were right too. Their stock plummeted but is recovering well and by all accounts, BlackBerry 10 could be something special. I really hope so, I don’t want to see this company die.
  • More than 50% of laptop models released this year will not include an optical drive (0 points.) There’s no doubt that far fewer laptops have them but I’ve not been able to find a statistic that confirms whether I’m right or not. If I can, I’ll update this but I think if more than half were ditching the optical drive, it would have made the news somewhere.
  • Hard drive prices will return to pre-flood levels (1 point.) Checking a few places online where I can buy a hard drive, I’m saying this is right.
  • Microsoft will announce a scaling back or removal of the new Start Screen in Windows 8 or make it 100% optional (0 points.) I was so wrong about this, I should almost be deducting points for it. I think the hate for Windows 8 is overblown but I do have major concerns about what it means for the future of Windows and the Start Screen is still stupid on anything that isn’t a touch screen. It’s questionable how well Windows 8 is selling right now so I hope Microsoft is taking the negative feedback to heart.
  • Windows 8 will shine on tablets and will also start to compete with Android for a big share of the iPad’s market (0.5 points.) I’m calling this a halfsie because by all accounts, Windows 8 is killer on tablets but Surface has apparently been a sales flop and the app ecosystem is not taking off like many (including myself) thought it would. This could still change but so far, it hasn’t made a dent in the market share of the other platforms.
  • Windows Phone 7 will get a massive marketing push and gain a lot of market share (0 points.) Windows Phone 7 became Windows Phone 8 and while it looks like interest and sales are ramping up, it hasn’t gained a ton of market share yet, certainly not even to make anyone besides maybe RIM nervous. My girlfriend bought a Lumia 920 though and thinks the iPhone pales in comparison to it, as do many other people. Microsoft is traditionally horrible at marketing but if they can figure that out, I still think they could have a winner here.
  • Twitter will continue to grow in popularity but still won’t figure out how to make money (1 points.) Calling it a win because it’s definitely still growing but given how there have been no stories about the financial success this year, no IPO and how they’re clamping down hard on how much third party clients can bang on their servers, I’m guessing they still don’t have a long-term business model yet.
  • Facebook will remain insanely popular but each user will do less with it (0.5 points.) It’s obviously still popular and a ton of people I know personally are using it less and less but I’m not convinced that’s the overall trend. As they continue to test the limits and patience of their users with more invasive ads and terms of use changed though, this might change.
  • 3D will continue to decline and possibly die off in the home entirely (1 point.) Most TV manufacturers are using 3D as a bullet point now but they’ve all run away from making that a reason to convince people to buy new sets. The big Japanese TV manufacturers are all nursing sucking chest wounds right now so they better figure something out fast. I was also right about how the idea of mainstream 2K or 4K TVs didn’t happen. 3D is still a thing in theatres but that’s about it.
  • Best Buy will announce a major corporate restructuring this year, closing underperforming stores and refocusing on providing high quality service (0.5 points.) If I allowed myself three quarter points, that’s what I would get because I was right about everything except the announced refocusing on high quality service. The company’s bleeding, stores have been closed and one of the original guys is trying to take the company private. Refocusing on service is the only thing that can save them but they’re still arrogantly convinced that the horrendous experience they currently offer is quality service.
  • Canadian third party Internet prices will rise but not as much as people fear (1 point.) Nailed it! Prices went up but only a little bit and as I understand it, the third party Canadian ISP industry is still squeaking out razor-thin margins. This makes me very happy to see, especially since more and more people I know are dumping the telecartels for them. They’re still fighting a tough war but I’m glad the fight’s being made.
  • I will continue to search in vain for a tech podcast that doesn’t spend most of its time fellating Apple or that realises tech news exists that doesn’t involve phones or tablets (1 point.) This was a joke prediction but I’m still right. I’ve tried me damndest to find one since dumping This is Only A Test after both the content and the attitude of the guys from that site finally drove me over the edge. I’ve yet to find another one that doesn’t continue to trumpet how Apple is our lord and saviour or that phones and tablets aren’t the only neat things in the world. It’s a shame but such is life. I don’t currently listen to any tech podcasts and I don’t really miss having one anyway.
  • SECTION SCORE: 9/14

TOTAL SCORE: 20.5/30

Overall, I’m still way more accurate than the majority of analysts that get quoted in the enthusiast press. That’s ridiculous and sad. I’m a guy with no knowledge of business or the inside scoop on anything and my largely uninformed guesses were better than guys who make orders of magnitude more than I do to spout this stuff. Insane. I’ve had better years but also worse years but to be honest, most of the stuff I was right on is stuff I would have been happy to be dead wrong about. I don’t like to be a prophet of doom but it seems like that’s my skill sometimes.

Check back tomorrow where my new predictions for 2013 will be unleashed! There will definitely be plenty of them as well as this is shaping up to be an even crazier year in gaming and tech than 2012 was.

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Microsoft’s Surface Tablet: The Bungle and the Potential

Leave a Comment Posted by on June 18, 2012

As I sat playing Battlefield 3 and watching Twitter on my other monitor, I was not unexpectedly shaking my head at the barrage of snide jokes from tech “journalists”, essentially pre-judging the tablet announcement everyone knew Microsoft was going to make because well, it wasn’t an Apple announcement and therefore is a failure by default. I wish I could have stayed on my high horse of smugness but alas, as the show wore on, I began to realise that Microsoft handed them a lot of ammunition for tomorrow. As someone who is only a mild fan of the iPad and was really stoked for a Windows based alternative, I’m now left only slightly more excited about Surface but with far more questions unanswered than I’d like. Microsoft has a potentially hit product on their hands but as usual, bungled the message.

First the good. I think Surface is a great name and repurposing an old and largely dead brand was a great way to keep this under wraps. From a hardware perspective, this thing looks pretty damn slick. Thin, light, powerful (especially the Intel version, holy crap), USB, HDMI and a case that turns into a keyboard and trackpad. If that thing works half as well as it looks, Apple’s Smart Cover just got curb stomped and the Asus Transformer looks bulky and overpriced. I’m also very pleased that they are releasing both ARM and Intel based versions for both the cost conscious and power hungry. As someone whose company has a lot of staff that works in the field and relies on specialised Windows software that needs Intel architecture, these could be a huge boon for us. They’re not much more expensive than laptops but far more convenient for our travelling staff, especially if they come with docking capabilities. The jury is still out on Metro on the desktop for me but I will make that judgement one day soon. iOS and Android are also disasters to get integrated into a Windows domain environment (I’ve heard Android’s improved this, haven’t had a chance to try) and having the native Windows platform will now make that a snap. Both myself and my users like a consistent experience across devices and as someone who thinks Apple’s user experience is both highly flawed and equally overrated, this is potentially a tablet I would want to buy for myself personally as well as for work, rather than splitting an iPad 2 with my girlfriend as I do now.

Pretty much all the rest was the bad. The first criticism every reporter is going to bring up is that there are no Metro apps yet and they’ll rightly say that apps are what make a platform. Microsoft could fix this by reaching out big to the development community (I’m thinking all the mobile game engine developers) and creating dead easy tools. The ARM version of Surface runs similar CPUs to iOS and Android so making “one-click” conversion tools wouldn’t theoretically be too hard and that gives them an instant base of core software to draw people in with. Once that base of apps is there, it’s a lot easier to sell numbers from the get go (this is a place where RIM really bombed it with the PlayBook) and the community will feed itself from there. Also, getting Valve to bring a version of Steam to Windows 8 tablets could be a game changer but with Microsoft’s ties to Xbox, that’s likely a pipe dream, at least on ARM. The problem is, none of this was even hinted at during this show. Apps weren’t really discussed at all from what I read and they didn’t trot out any popular developers to affirm their commitment to Windows 8. Given that none of what I just mentioned has happened on Windows Phone 7, I have to wonder if Microsoft foolishly thinks like RIM did, that developers will flock to their new platform just on the virtue of it existing. Sorry guys, not going to happen. If you don’t get developers on this in a huge way and scream about that from rooftops, this thing will gather dust on shelves.

Then there’s pricing and availability. One of the things I will concede that Apple does better than everyone is announcements. They do the events very well, they always have a date and a price on new products and in most cases, they’re available very shortly thereafter. What we got from Microsoft today was that the ARM version of Surface will come out with Windows 8 (no firm date was given), the Intel versions will ship more or less 3 months later, that version will be comparably prices to Ultrabooks and they aren’t talking about the ARM price at all. Umm…you’re kidding right? Now I know that unlike Apple, Microsoft has a lot of OEM partners they can’t risk pissing off. But make no mistake, the reason they’re doing Surface themselves is because their partners can’t get their act together and release compelling tablets of their own fast enough. Apple is eating the tablet market’s lunch and announcing a product with a nebulous release date that’s months away and refusing to even hint at the price of the ARM model that’s going to be the main driver with consumers is borderline suicidal. They managed to build a lot of excitement by showing the device and then left the most important details hanging in the air. Now it’s going to be left up to speculation and even as the show ended, I saw tweets from people asking what Microsoft’s hiding.

What they needed to do was go “Here’s Surface, here’s awesome software on Surface from people you know, here’s the price, it’s a lot cheaper than the iPad and oh by the way, you can buy the ARM version next week.” That would have blown people’s minds and gotten them positive PR like they’ve never seen. Instead, they went “Here’s Surface, the hardware is cool, no we’re not really showing software, we aren’t giving pricing on the cheap one, the expensive one will cost as much or more than a MacBook Air and it might come out in 4-5 months.” That. Sucks. Apple’s not going to announce the new iPad until next year, why did this have to happen now? What advantage did announcing today have against announcing in November and shipping right away, other than pissing off lazy OEMs who have largely dropped the ball on tablets? What, are Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo etc. going to pout and refuse to launch Windows 8 tablets because you didn’t wait for them? Of course not and if they did, too bad guys, get with the program next time. Tablets are coming hard and anyone who doesn’t have the sense or ability to get in now deserves to get left behind.

Microsoft is far from fighting for their life. There will be more Windows devices sold this year and the total lifetime sales of iPads and iPhones combined. But that’s a balance that can and is already starting to tip and while Windows is going nowhere any time soon, Microsoft has got to get in the tablet ring swinging. Windows Phone 7′s anaemic adoption (despite being the best mobile experience right now) is proof of that. I’m all for a tablet that has more function than form and this could be it. But much like Nintendo at E3, I went in ready to pre-order if convinced and left wondering if this is worth it now. I’m not the only one who thinks this way guys and when many are relying on an Apple fanboy laden tech press for their buying decisions, you can’t afford any missteps. Get your act together Microsoft, fast.

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Apple’s (And Soon Microsoft’s) Big Threats to Choice

3 Comments Posted by on May 29, 2012

UPDATE: Since I posted this entry, Microsoft has decided to change the Metro-only restriction on their free development tools. A smart move on their part.

I make no secret of the fact that while there are many cool things Apple does, I am not a fan of many of the company’s practices nor the lazy, fanboy driven press that salivates and gives free PR to everything they do, usually free of criticism. The innovations made by Apple products in recent years are undeniable and they are finally pushing an otherwise stagnant tech industry forward with new ideas that involve more than just bumped specs. However, not all of these ideas are good ones and the success Apple is meeting with some are driving others like Microsoft towards similar models that while they are beneficial in some ways, also serve to greatly hurt consumers and the power we have to self-determine our experiences with technology. The biggest threat that Apple (and soon Microsoft) represent is the restriction and constriction of user choice.

I’ve said for a while now that Apple’s biggest failing as a company (from a consumer perspective, clearly not yet a financial one) is that their products are designed around limiting consumer options. You can only buy Mac and iOS hardware from one place, you have a very limited number of options for that hardware, it’s largely not upgradable (or in the case of iOS devices, not at all) and it’s purpose-designed to be a treadmill of forced obsolescence that requires users to upgrade their products on Apple’s desired schedule instead of theirs, creating huge amount of technological and monetary waste. With the App Store, they’ve taken this a step further by ensuring that all iOS devices only have one place where you can buy software for them. This is a place Apple controls in every way from approval of what software you can see to how add-ons for it can be purchased to how updates are delivered. They also get a 30% cut of every penny spent on this software, a fairly respectable number given how little they really offer developers beyond permission to list there.

Compare that to the PC landscape where you have dozens of vendors selling pre-built PCs with hundreds of options, you can custom build a system in just about any configuration you can fathom, you have multiple operating system choices and within those, hundreds of different ways to acquire both free and paid software. Many have criticised the PC as being the “wild west” and all the complexity and risks that come with that but I see that as its greatest trait. If you are a new user who needs to be guided by the hand, there are options for that. If you’re a power user like myself who likes to poke, prod and tweak every aspect of your computing experience, you can do that too. If your budget for a computer is $400 or $4,000, there’s options to suit what you want. This has never been the case with Apple and I find their furthering that to greater and greater extremes each year to be a dangerous precedent. For all of the failings of Windows (and there are many), it’s still my preferred OS because of the freedom it offers me while also giving me access to the widest array of software and tools available. When I use a Mac, I’m always feeling as if it’s trying to make me use it the way Apple feels is ideal as opposed to the way I feel is ideal which is how computing is supposed to be.

My biggest worry for the future of technology today is how Apple and now Microsoft with Windows 8 are aggressively pushing the vision of having stricter control over what you do with your computing devices. They are both heavily pushing native software stores that they control (and get a cut from), Apple is planning to make it much more frustrating to install non-App Store delivered content, Microsoft is pushing the new Metro app-driven Start Screen down people’s throats whether they want it or not, they tried to force PC manufacturers to lock out alternative operating systems (they backed off from that but only on the desktop side) and they’re restricting the free versions of development tools to Metro app development only. Much like iOS apps, Metro apps will only be deliverable through Microsoft’s proprietary store. To be fair, Microsoft isn’t trying to restrict or curtail traditional software development and delivery the way Apple seems to be but given the ability these two companies can have to get a piece of every piece of software sold for their respective systems, it stands to reason that they’ll continue to try to squeeze alternatives out more moving forward.

As someone who gets my free and paid software from a wide variety of different places (often depending on who is offering the best deal), this prospect terrifies me and it should terrify every other computer user as well. Both of these companies were already making a ton of money and will continue to without cornering the software delivery market. They are trying to change the value in what they offer us from being the platform on which a variety of things can run to create an experience ideal for each user to one where they are in charge of what we get to consume, how we get to consume it and all the while, taking their percentage from the software authors for the privilege of getting to play in their walled garden. This isn’t the way computers are supposed to be and there’s no need for it beyond enriching the platform holders at the expense of consumer interests.

They claim this is done under the guise of keeping things easy to use and secure but that’s frankly bollocks. Yes, there are a lot of stupid computer users out there and many security problems which largely result from that stupidity. Nonetheless, we’ve been managing fine up to this point and forcing us to get our software from your store where you can shove competition aside for any reason you choose and confine innovation only to that which doesn’t impeded your business interests is not going to improve that. Is iOS only easy to use and secure because the users don’t have access to third party app stores? To claim that position to me says that Apple doesn’t think very highly of their average user’s intelligence. And given that every iOS release gets jailbroken almost immediately, I would say the security claims have already been disproved repeatedly. But then, convincing people that Apple loves and respects its users while actively working against their interests has been among the company’s greatest achievements. I’ve embraced PCs and Windows, faults and all, because I never got the impression from Microsoft that they wanted things to act in a similar, at least not until now. They are a company that’s out to make money but they were already making lots and growing amounts of it and seemed fine with that. Now, having seen Apple’s insane (and unsustainable) profits made on the backs of monopolising the software delivery business as well, they’ve realised there’s a huge slice of the pie they could be getting and want it no matter what.

This greedy mindset represents one of the biggest threats to innovation and consumer freedom when it comes to technology in my opinion. The greatest thing technology has permitted is larger democratization, making it easier for people to create and express both in terms of what they make and do with their tools and how they are able to tailor those tools to their needs. When the two biggest players start locking the doors to their kingdoms and start to limit who gets keys to it based not on the needs and desires of their customers but of their own business interests, technology moves away from a democratic model to a totalitarian one. What if an app offends their corporate standards of taste that may not line up with yours or what if an app does something better than one of theirs which they are trying to sell for more? There are many examples of software that was denied by Apple for both of these reasons. Call my position hyperbolic if you want but when Apple and Microsoft are allowed to decide what gets to be installed on what is supposed to be your computer,  your tablet and your phone, who really owns that device you paid for?

I don’t know what the best solution is to this problem. I’m not normally a fan of governments telling businesses how to run themselves but ultimately, consumer interests are greater and these companies enjoy positions that don’t simply give people the ability to just “speak with their wallets”. When the platform holders are already making record profits, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to tell them that they need to keep improving their products to entice people to keep buying them, not start sapping away secondary revenue sources and forcing people to use them so they can keep making money after they’ve already made their money. If the only way you can keep making money for your business is by sticking your nose into other people’s, then your leadership is failing and you need fresh thinking. Keeping technology open and free for choices and the innovation that comes from them should be paramount and this is a vision that Apple and Microsoft no longer share. Consumers need and deserve a better solution that what we’re proposing, I just wonder if we’re too blinded by the new shiny to demand it.

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How RIM Can (Maybe) Save Itself

Leave a Comment Posted by on January 24, 2012

I’ve been thinking about making a post like this for a while now and in light of yesterday’s big news, I figured there’s no better a time than now.

I’ve been a mostly happy BlackBerry user for almost seven years now. I received my first one when I was hired on with Geek Squad Canada (I just felt a chill mentioning that name), I bought my own in 2008 and when I started with my current employer, they took over my plan and gave me another one. Just a couple of weeks ago, our entire company upgraded to shiny new Bold 9900s. They’re arguably the best BlackBerries ever made but I will say that if my employer wasn’t paying for my cell service, I would have probably bought an Android phone. I’ve always liked the fact that their phones are well made, easy to use and while not feature and app rich, do what they do very well. To this day, there is no better a single device for handling e-mail and phone calls, especially in a business environment. What BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has failed to understand the last several years is that’s no longer enough. Consumers, not enterprise are driving the epic growth in smartphones right now and they’ve made it abundantly clear that what they want is apps, media capabilities, speed and pretty interfaces. For all my legitimate problems with Apple this is something they, Android and to a lesser extent, Microsoft with Windows Phone 7 understand well. BlackBerries are very good at what they do but compared to the competition, they’re basic at best. They have an anaemic app landscape, they’re underpowered and while their interface is functional, it’s not what I would call eye-grabbing. Their attempt at a tablet with the PlayBook was a very nice piece of hardware with a nice operating system running it but it lacked some of the most boneheadedly fundamental features such as e-mail, calendar and contacts unless you were prepared to endure the hassle of pairing it with a BlackBerry phone as well. As a result, an otherwise nice device has been a dismal failure, even after steep price cuts.

In short, they’re out of touch with what the biggest growth segment in smartphones and tablets wants. Consumers have responded by driving RIM’s market share from total domination down to estimates as low as 15% by the end of last year. Their stock price has tanked (they were once Canada’s most valuable company) and they have managed to cling to profitability but only because they keep swinging the axe on staff every couple of months. Most of these failures can be attributed to their (now ex) Co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis. These two men have an impressive legacy. They started RIM from scratch, invented the smartphone as we know it (something many people forget) and led their Waterloo startup to stratospheric heights. Then Apple and Google got into the game. Unfortunately, the great danger faced by many who go unchallenged for too long–an inflated ego–took hold of them and they more or less refused to acknowledge the changing times, hoping that by looking at the ground and putting their fingers in their ears, they could just shut out what was happening around them. They thought that people were loyal to BlackBerry and that what they wanted was function over form. While there are people like me who will often agree with that sentiment, the public likes shiny things more, something Apple has done an exceptional job of proving. RIM still does business class devices like no one else but it’s only a matter of time until they are challenged in that arena as well. When you try to create a product for consumers and have it designed solely by engineers, disaster in the market is often the result. BlackBerry devices go a step further than that: Their vision was crafted by mathematicians.

All is not lost however. For the time being, Research In Motion is still is good financial condition. As of this writing they have zero debt, $1.31 billion in cash on hand and even with their stock at a fraction of what it once was, a market cap of $8.02 billion. That’s nothing to sneeze at and though they’ve only managed to maintain profitability by slicing and dicing their workforce, they are nonetheless still profitable. They arguably have the resources to mount a huge restructuring, nay reboot of the company both operationally and from a vision and design standpoint and there has never been a better or more important time for that than right now. I am certainly no business expert but I do know a Hell of a lot about technology trends and based on what I’ve seen, I’d like to offer the following humble suggestions to RIM:

  • Fire Balsillie and Lazaridis and replace them with a new visionary who understands design and consumer products: They did indeed fire them (yeah yeah they “resigned”, that just means being fired while saving face) and their replacement (former COO Thorsten Heins) is another member of the old guard who was hand picked by them and whose stated vision is “I don’t think there is a drastic change needed.” Swing and a miss. If he was being promoted on a temporary basis until another replacement could be found I could understand it but apparently this is the guy they think will lead RIM to a triumphant return. Given the beating their stock price took today, it appears shareholders agree with me that this is facepalm worthy. The old guard’s arrogance is what put RIM in their current situation, doubling down on a strategy that doesn’t work is not the path to success. Look at the recording industry for an example of this. What the company needs is someone from the outside who has no vested interest or relationships with the current entrenched senior staff. Someone who isn’t afraid to jettison what isn’t working and make sweeping changes to the product line, the software and the overall creative vision. In short, as much as it pains me to say it, RIM needs their Steve Jobs. The new CEO of Nokia wasn’t afraid to undertake a strategy like this. He came in, promptly partnered with Microsoft for Windows Phone 7 and said they were dumping the Symbian operating system because it wasn’t working anymore. He pissed a lot of people off when he did that but the fruits of that decision are starting to show and almost everyone thinks Nokia will be better for it. People like this are out there, RIM needs one and fast.
  • Find the best designers you can find and spend whatever it takes to get them: Design in both the hardware and software experience is key to any consumer facing smartphone or tablet. RIM actually has some very good hardware engineers who know how to build comfortable, super reliable and relatively elegant hardware. It’s also bulky, utilitarian and frankly, kind of ugly. Their OS suffers similar problems. BlackBerry OS has made some aesthetic improvements since v6 but it still has a long way to go to compete with Android, Windows Phone 7 and iOS. Each of these systems has something that makes it unique and appealing from a visual and usability standpoint. For Android it’s widgets, for Windows Phone 7 it’s the metro tiles and for iOS, it’s the bubbly icons and menu elements. All of these are backed up by responsive controls and smooth animations which just make them feel good to use. BlackBerry needs its own variant of this, an identity for its user interface that’s attractive and unique to the platform. There is no shortage of amazing design talent out there and some of the best are at your competitors. Hire the best headhunters, let these designers name their price and give it to them as well as the creative freedom needed to do the next step.
  • Nuke the ecosystem and start fresh: I like the BlackBerry OS quite a bit but it’s long in the tooth and it’s simply not up to the task of enchanting the public in its current form. It’s true that they have announced BBX as the successor and it will be based on the polished QNX base that powers the PlayBook which is a step in the right direction. However, it still clings to a lot of the user interface and under the hood technologies from the old system and that’s not a big enough change. RIM made a smart investment when they bought QNX and putting their kernel under the hood is a good idea but everything else (and I mean everything else) about the BlackBerry experience needs to be wiped out and redone from a blank piece of paper. Design new phones, design a new tablet, design a whole new OS with a whole new interface, give them powerful guts (a really good camera would help too), pre-load them with really snazzy apps and for the love of everything, ditch the current naming convention that relies on boring adjectives and nouns and worse yet, indistinguishable numbers. I’ve been a user of your products for years and I can’t keep them all straight.
  • Make good developer tools and court the community: I don’t write software but I know people who do and the chief complaint I hear about BlackBerry versus other platforms is that the developer tools suck hard. They’re not easy to use, the reliance on Java hinders performance and cross-platform portability and App World is a headache to use for both developers and end users. RIM has made some statements lately they they know they haven’t been as good towards developers as they should have been (at least they’re finally admitting it) but their solution seems to be the Android emulation layer they’re pushing as a cornerstone of BBX, rather than writing all new, intuitive tools for their own platform. I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. Sure, making BBX able to run Android code sounds good because it gives them instant access to the existing Android app ecosystem and developer community but there are problems. Firstly Android software is designed for phones with large, long touch screens. The only model RIM sells that has one is the BlackBerry Torch. My new Bold 9900 has a touch screen but it’s small and square, not long and rectangular. That means most Android software won’t fit on it and asking developers to design a version of their UI for one phone’s very different screen size is a fool’s errand. Secondly BBX will not run Android apps natively, it will do so through emulation meaning that the BlackBerry will essentially pretend it’s an Android phone, at least as far as the app is concerned. Emulation by its very nature is much slower because the app essentially is being “translated” in real time as it runs. It also often introduces compatibility problems as many developers will use unique programming tricks to squeeze extra power out of a device and emulators often can’t interpret these tricks properly. There’s no way RIM can overcome these problems without either putting processors in their devices that far outweigh what’s in current Android devices (thus making theirs too expensive) or spending an inordinate amount of developer time and user hassle keeping the emulation layer current and super optimised. That’s not worth it and those resources are clearly better spent developing top notch tools for your own platform, rather than trying to piggyback off someone else’s as a band aid solution. Once they have the tools, the next step is to court the community to write native versions of their software for your platform. How do you do that? Give them hardware and if necessary, money. Find the most popular app and game developers on iOS and Android, give them free phones and tablets to develop with, give them a robust and well staffed support and community system and if that isn’t enough, offer to fund the BlackBerry versions of their titles. Consider going to major middleware providers like Unity and Epic Games and offer to co-fund development of BlackBerry editions of their technology. You might even want to consider buying yourselves a couple of high profile exclusives. Ask Kairosoft, Halfbrick or if you must, Rovio how much it would take to make their next projects exclusive to BlackBerry.
  • Market like you’ve never marketed before: Your current ads are confusing, don’t really preach the merits of your products beyond quick shots and really just show supposedly famous people (who really no one’s heard of) using them. That’s not good enough. People by and large don’t want to buy your stuff because a celebrity was paid to say it’s good. People want to buy your stuff because it looks cool. Every Apple commercial is just a narrator talking over (and sometimes not even that) someone doing cool stuff with their products up close. Don’t sell who uses your stuff, sell why those people and the ones watching want to use your stuff.

All of these suggestions are going to cost a lot of money, this I know. It will involve tapping a lot of the cash RIM has left and likely taking on some debt too. This is also probably a two or three year plan at least. Until it can be implemented, they’ll simply have to try to make due with keeping their current base of business and cash-strapped students happy to stay afloat. No one ever claimed rebooting a failing company was cheap or easy. This is a risky endeavour and should it fail, it will definitely kill the company. However, things aren’t working now and if the choice is to burn out fighting or bleed to death in the corner, I think the former is preferable and will leave a much better legacy. If RIM is going to do this, it needs to do it while it has cash in the bank, not while it’s gasping for air. Such a strategy would be the company’s last push but should it succeed, it will put them squarely back in the smartphone and tablet fight and could catapult them to a high point again. It’s something that will go down as one of the high tech industry’s biggest blunders or biggest turnaround success stories.

RIM has an impressive past behind it that will always be admired but the past is not how you make money and it isn’t how you satisfy investors. The smartphone and tablet space needs more competition, not less and dammit, we have some huge technology innovators in Canada, we should be a big part of that! The question now is, does RIM let old thinking continue to drive them into the ground or are they will to let the past be just that and embark on a new potential path to redemption and future success? You guys can save yourselves, it’s just a question of whether you have the balls to seize the chance while you can afford it. Step up and start a revolution!

Business, Mobile Phones, Predictions, Tablets, Technology , , , , , ,

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