[stevetaz]

FWIW....I am certainly not a RIM hater and there are many posters here who are also not haters, but you have to have your head buried in the sand to not recognize that RIM continues to shoot themselves in the foot after inventing the smartphone market.

They appear to have sat back and rested on their success while the others in the industry clawed their way up the ladder by innovating and listening to consumers. BlackBerry started out as a provider focused on corporate services and they were the 800 pound gorilla. Those corporate clients were quite happy, but they are made up of many different people with varied needs and when they started to demand more than secure email RIM either didn't hear them or chose not to.

I loved my BlackBerry and hated to give it up, but my company made the decision to leave due to costs as well as the demands for the devices to do more.

Through my years with BB I noticed what seemed to be an arrogance on the part of RIM. A simple thing like announcing a new device with a target release date became almost laughable because everyone seemed resigned that the target date was an illusion. The assumption was that the actual date would be months away and the same seemed to hold true for important OS updates. The familiar battery leaks back in the 4.2 era went for how long before it was finally corrected? Updates would be released but it was almost impossible to find something as simple as a change log detailing what was different because RIM just didn't release those.

Device after device came out over the past few years and they were hard to tell apart. You almost had to look at the model numbers just to know one was different from the other. Then the Storm hit. Big fail. Storm 2 was an improvement, but their marketing was so poor you couldn't know anything was changed or that they even released a better version.

An email giant releasing an important entry like their PlayBook tablet without a native email client? What were they thinking? They said it would be out within 60 days and here we are what, 9 months later hoping we are lucky enough that the update hits 10 months later? That says nothing of all the other improvements that were promised.

Yes, I bought a PlayBook and I do think it has some very strong points, but it almost seemed like they did everything they could to kill it before it hit the market as well as after.

QNX was to be their savior. Delay, delay delay. Will it work with BES? Who knows? Will it actually be released this year? Maybe.

Believe me, I truly hope RIM can right the ship, but in the brief time I was with them (3 years +/-) I got a very bad taste for what they seemed to be doing with their customer base....Ignoring them.

Now to see the annointed ones step down, but the replacement goes out of his way to say he didn't think there was drastic change needed? I don't expect anyone to bash their predecessors, but a statement like we will examine every facet of what we do to make sure we are heading upward might have been a bit more reassuring.

Seeing one of the dynamic duo as the head of the Innovation Committee? That is truly laughable and not very reassuring at all.

Again, I hope they can turn it around. As far as the USA not being the whole industry, that is correct, but it is a very important part and it is their backyard......

Just an opinion.....