It is, and it will be this way as long as consumers continue choose style and appearance over functionality.
Put yourself in Jim B's shoes for a second - RIM comes from a heavy enterprise background where things like stability and security were far more important than features (and you can see this by looking at older blackberries that always lagged in features like cameras, multimedia etc), but is trying to make a big impact in the consumer space. You've got a device (Storm) that basically has a beta firmware, but you know WILL sell quite well over the holidays? What do you do?
Well, you do what your competitors (Android and iPhone) do and sacrifice a lot to get to market sooner. The Android G1 is a pretty shitty piece of hardware with an incomplete OS (just look at the features in the 'cupcake' branch) and you can go back and look at the problems iPhone OS2.0 had this summer (regular browser crashes, major lagginess, epic MobileMe launch etc).
So yeah, it is the new reality, but despite a few complaints here and there, consumers won't really mind.
Stability is a feature you can sell to me. I was a loyal BB user for several years until two hardware failures and one software failure made me think about just exactly how much stability I was actually getting for my ugly fonts and crummy browsing experience.
I purchased a Nokia E71 (which my wife has taken and loves) to replace the BBs, which is a step down on the stability scale but several steps up on the feature scale. I guess that means their CEO is right, at least in my case.
yeah it is a nice system: getting people to pay to become beta testers; though being on the edge has its benefits looking at the success of things such as 'ifart'
Put yourself in Jim B's shoes for a second - RIM comes from a heavy enterprise background where things like stability and security were far more important than features (and you can see this by looking at older blackberries that always lagged in features like cameras, multimedia etc), but is trying to make a big impact in the consumer space. You've got a device (Storm) that basically has a beta firmware, but you know WILL sell quite well over the holidays? What do you do?
Well, you do what your competitors (Android and iPhone) do and sacrifice a lot to get to market sooner. The Android G1 is a pretty shitty piece of hardware with an incomplete OS (just look at the features in the 'cupcake' branch) and you can go back and look at the problems iPhone OS2.0 had this summer (regular browser crashes, major lagginess, epic MobileMe launch etc).
So yeah, it is the new reality, but despite a few complaints here and there, consumers won't really mind.