[lophreaque]

Geez, RIM made #7:

Link - 10 notable blunders of 2011

10 notable blunders of 2011
EE Times Staff
12/21/2011 1:09 PM EST
7. RIM nixes Java
Research in Motion announced earlier this year it will unify its Blackberry, Playbook and QNX embedded operating systems sometime in 2012, but the resulting BBX environment will not support the custom Java APIs that are the basis for today's Blackberry smartphone applications.

Time will tell whether or not this is a bonehead move. At the very least it's a questionable gamble and one that RIM did not communicate clearly and broadly at its developer conference in San Francisco.

The vast majority of today's Blackberry apps are based on RIM's Java APIs. The company's big message to developers this year was to shift to either HTML5 or native code.

Sure, the future for mobile Java is iffy at best. Java's owner, Oracle, says it will shepherd mobile Java in to the future, but it makes its money in back-end systems for the cloud. Meanwhile it is suing Google over its implementation of Java in Android.

But it's a bad time for RIM to be giving developers a reason to go elsewhere. Android has become the most popular mobile platform by far, Apple still gets all the attention and Windows Phone is making a comeback.

Maybe someday BBX will be the next hot mobile environment. But for today, RIM's market share is slipping, its Playbook is getting panned and many of its developers are going back to the drawing board. -- Rick Merritt

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[Blacklac]

first Java is outdated and old, now RIM should have stuck with it? Confusing. Nevermind the fact that BBOS will be around for a period of time along with BBX.

[lophreaque]

I think the point was that it seems that RIM is giving developers a reason to go elsewhere.
Popular apps = successful tablet or phone
Developers discouraged from making popular apps = not successful tablet or phone