Or that they would produce a "business tablet" that can't actually do email or calendar/contacts PIM without tethering to a BlackBerry. Those features are what RIM was famous for!
If you could be a fly-on-the-wall of any tech meeting in history, somewhere in my top 10 would be the one that decided the tethering business. I just don't understand how no one went "hold up, this is not going to work, the iPad has e-mail".
Someone may have said that and then was likely shouted down by others thinking that they could use the Playbook to drive sales of their phone division. Still a laughable decision though.
This seems entirely possible. One of the big problems at large companies is that political clout is often tied to how much revenue your division bring in. That makes sense, except that whatever group is making the "new/next thing" is almost always much smaller revenue than the current mature business. So they lose those kinds of arguments.
Wow. So that's what's behind the innovator's dilemma? Your competitors will cannibalize the market share of your existing products, when your own staff could have gotten there first but their part of the organization didn't have the authority to get away with it?
I think it's more complex than that - there's also usually more risk associated with the newer technology, and it's often lower margin (not in this case.) So you have this new division saying, we're going to build a product that cannibalizes our main business, and makes less money per customer... and that's just not very easy to sell.
So instead, someone who doesn't have your old business comes along and builds it instead. And you end up either buying them, or fading away.
at first, i also thought it was stupid that they required you to tether it to a blackberry. then i realized that i kind of like that fact that you don't need to buy two $80 / month data plans (though tethering a blackberry by bluetooth kills the battery) for each.
too bad the playbook was too little, too late, and too expensive. hope they take a cue from HP and drop the price massively to clear their inventory
That logic doesn't really hold water - every other tablet on the market has Wifi access and can do native calendaring and e-mail. And with the Wifi it can almost always be tethered to a phone as well. So for most users, they don't need two 3G data plans at all.
Additionally tablet only 3G data plans start at 20$ in Canada, and even the largest plans don't come near 80$.
