So RIM just announced that they are limiting vacations and lengthening work weeks on the QNX side of the house to get BB10 done!?!? This after announcing they are pushing back availability to get things done. So how messed up is BB10 if they not only can't make the 2012 delivery window, but have to increase work weeks and limit vacations to make a March 2013 delivery? How could RIM be so far off up to last week on how thing were progressing?
Personally I think RIM should dump money in to hire some temp talent to augment existing coding talent and make an October delivery to hit the holidays. I'm not sure if the current talent can pull this off even with more time. They can say carriers are happy that the phones won't be available until then because of LTE rollouts, but no one who would buy or develop for the platform is happy about this, and it is time for RIM to realize that the people and not the carriers are their customer and the one's to be made happy!
Wow. Didn't hear about the vacations and work time. I hope they just massively underestimated how work needed to be done, because the alternative is that RIM was lying to us all along. Although, neither option looks good. Missing the holidays is a killer because although RIM is primarily used for business, you definitely need the casual consumer's interest for survival, and people are going to buy what's available and get locked in for two years on their contract.
Limiting Vacations and lenghthening work weeks is probably to reduce the chance for the dev tem to acquire distractions which would lessen their focus.
However, I read a study just a couple of months ago stating that longer hours make people less productive, so I really hope it does not work against them.
