I’ve thought a lot over the past few years about my interview with Lazaridis, particularly how dismissive he was about touch and certain he was about BlackBerry’s strength with corporate IT. The early reviews of Heins peg him as being a company insider while slagging him for saying “drastic change” isn’t needed. His first press conference didn’t help dispel these sentiments.

Looking further back, however, Heins has a track record that’s anything but Lazaridian: He introduced innovative products, bold partnerships and new form factors one after another. The only problem is, they generally were pretty terrible.

From Siemens with Love

Take one of Heins’ earliest RIM collaborations, when he was still Siemens’ mobile phone chief. He helped introduce the Siemens’ manufactured, BlackBerry-powered SK65. As The Register reported in August 2004:

Heins said he is positioning the SK65 at the top end of Siemens’ range. Doesn’t that clash with the SX1 Symbian-based smart phone, we wondered? No, it seems. The SX1, with is camera and multimedia playback functionality is pitched at a broader audience than the SK65, which the company hopes will attract CIOs keen to equip staff with a executive-styled handset that can connect to enterprise data yet doesn’t offer too much scope for personal usage.

In other words, Heins strategy was charge more while purposefully doing less, a strategy that worked hand-in-hand with pre-iPhone carrier strategies, but which still seems a little chilling to come out and admit. That philosophy is still not as crazy as what the phone looked like, however: The phone sported an “innovative” flip keyboard that flipped sideways, underneath the phone (see above). It’s the closet thing I’ve ever seen to the wonderful oPhone parody commercial:

But it gets better.

On a Highway to Hell

The niche market of ultra-luxury phones is an easy target, since they almost always sport inferior hardware, garish design, and excessive premiums for a product that performs worse than its contemporaries in almost every measure.

On that note, meet the Porsche Design P´9981 Smartphone from BlackBerry.

To it’s credit, it does sport RIM’s latest version of BlackBerry OS, but that’s only because BlackBerry next OS iteration keeps getting pushed back. On that note, what BlackBerry offers with the P´9981 is a mediocre phone on a last-generation platform that retails for $2,000. One pundit wailed that with the Porsche P’9981, RIM Fiddles While Rome is Burning. The truth is that while RIM’s own empire might be crumbling, the state of mobile phones overall has never been stronger, with more innovative players offer stronger offerings for both work and play.

But what about IT?

This all circles back to the central question for RIM: Where does its future lie? Its past was as an excellent, battery-sipping e-mail centric phone, but RIM’s insistence on beefy processors that will handle 4G likely means an end to its battery sipping days even as its e-mail downtime have made its offering seem (whatever the actual case) a riskier choice than Apple, Android or Microsoft’s tools.

RIM’s other traditional pillar has been cooperating closely with IT and telecoms, but Heins has been reiterating that RIM needs to get closer to the “consumer base” to reflect new buying habits, and carriers are reluctant to throw in much energy to promote RIM unless it shows signs of turning things around.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. Followed him on Twitter or reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

“Underwhelming is a good word,” analyst from MacDougall, MacDougall and MacTier told the Times.

For once, Microsoft has actually set a better example in the world of mobile and applications. Perhaps RIM should have taken a page out of the old Microsoft Build book and wooed its potential developers with hip new devices equipped with BBX. Instead, it frustrated the crowd with more vague information about the actual release date for BBX phones and no opportunity for developers to interact with prototypes.

Others think the simple act of renaming the OS from QNX, which PlayBooks are running, to BBX is a mistake. Ken Dulaney, VP of mobile computing at Gartner, told Tech News World that it “could be confusing for the BlackBerry community,” making “it look like RIM doesn’t have a unified operating system approach.” And RIM would do best not to confuse its loyal customers so soon after trying their patience with the recent BlackBerry outages around the world. The subsequent offer of free apps and free technical support (for one month, for enterprise customers) did little to patch up the largest network outage in the company’s history. As one community member of Slashdot put it: “This is the second major outage RIM has experience while my company has used their phones. Unfortunately for them, this one came right in the middle of my company’s evaluation period for new phones company-wide and it just sealed their fate. RIM’s going bye-bye.”

RIM wasn’t all foibles, however. The company finally delivered a set of software tools that will ease the transition of apps originally made for Android to BlackBerry phones. But analysts cringe at RIM’s adherence to the Android platform instead of fighting against it and offering something better.

Telecommunications analyst Jeff Kagan told Tech News World the trick to RIM’s avoiding “going bye-bye”: “They have to wow the marketplace. They haven’t wowed the marketplace since the Apple iPhone came out. The marketplace has yawned when it comes to BlackBerry.”

What do you think RIM could do to wake us up to BlackBerry?

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Sacco’s article closes on what is supposed to be a positive note:

“Nothing has changed” for RIM and BlackBerry, [Kirkup] says.

The company still has a very solid foundation, Kirkup says, built on more than a decade of mobile-device-specific work in the technology industry. RIM is still the security de facto for many governments and other security-conscious organizations. It still has many, many loyal users. And RIM is currently producing and shipping the best products it’s ever offered, according to Kirkup.

For RIM, “Nothing has changed.” Unfortunately, the rest of the world has. IT no longer calls the shots on technology the way it once did. As HP will sadly tell you, a slick, next generation OS doesn’t necessarily cut it, and RIM’s updates haven’t received the critical plaudits that WebOS has.

Back in 2008, I wrote an article with the cringe-worthy headline “Six simple steps to killing the iPhone” (Scroll down to get past the fake reg wall). Looking back, I don’t think the 6 bullet points were seriously flawed (nor were they brilliant insights), but so far, while phone manufacturers have followed a few to near perfect (Clone the iPhone, Take a deep breath) and scored middling on others (start including good browsers, opening the store front), they have completely blown it on what could be the most important point: Start treating your users like the customers and not the carriers.

The truly disruptive thing about the iPhone was that it was and continues to be a device built for users, with very little regard to what the carriers want (and traditionally demand). If the iOS is a closed ecosystem (and it is), it is much more closed to the whims of AT&T and Verizon than it is to the users. Even the open Android OS can’t claim this: My Droid 2 came with a Need for Speed 2 demo, Blockbuster’s subscription service and Motorola’s terrible UI implementations not only pre-installed but also impossible to remove.

Today, RIM still relies on and boasts about its tight carrier and IT relationships: It’s push e-mail service, in fact, doesn’t work without its centralized push e-mail service, which ultimately leads to its flagship tablet launching without an independent e-mail client. RIM’s push infrastructure served the company very well over the years, but Apple, Microsoft and Google have all shown you can have great e-mail without an extra centralized point of failure and without an extra “BlackBerry” tax on already pricey phone plans.

They’ve also shown that IT is grudgingly willing to support users in ways that would have been unthinkable a few years ago: While Apple and Google have slowly been making progress on IT demands, a lot of creativity and dialogue has allowed users to bring in new ways of working and devices to work on without the end-of-the-world scenarios more curmudgeonly techies have warned about.

Unfortunately, RIM still doesn’t seem to get this: They see their years of legacy technology, partnerships and experience as their primary assets. All that’s needed, in their minds, is a thin veneer of new paint, an OS re-fresh, but the reality is the fundamental orientation of computing is moving towards being more humane, usable and useful. While I have no doubt that RIM’s latest line of products is a marked improvement, I have seen no indication that the company understands this shift.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

But what about all the executives who were simply overriding IT to bring in the iPhone?

“I think the iPhone has a great deal of appeal to a certain class of users,” he said, adding that Apple’s design-centric approach would ultimately limit its appeal by sacrificing needed enterprise functionality. “I think over-focus on one blinds you to the value of the other.”

Lazaridis’ critiques weren’t off base: Apple is just now launching volume licensing and B2B-app capabilities on its app store, and it lacks the capability to do fine-grained command-and-control of app installation, modification and restriction that BlackBerry administrators have long enjoyed. But that hasn’t slowed RIM’s slide in smart phone marketshare to the Cupertino giant, and I think Lazaridis has grown to regret his own company’s blindness: The company announced it’s laying off about 11% of its workforce, or 2,000 people, today.

To put that in perspective, however, RIM points out that its workforce has quadrupled in the past 4 years, driven largely by acquisitions, and the layoffs are part of a larger “cost optimization program” the company has implemented. Still, with a tepid reception to both its tablet and touch phone line, the company is in need of a way to re-stake its territory.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

From the official RIM announcement:

The new BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express software will be provided free of charge in order to address two key market opportunities. First, the software offers economical advantages to small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) that desire the enterprise-grade security and manageability of BlackBerry® Enterprise Server but don’t require all of its advanced features. Second, more and more consumers are purchasing BlackBerry smartphones and the free BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express software provides a cost-effective solution that enables IT departments to meet the growing demand from employees to be able to connect their personal BlackBerry smartphones to their work email.

The offering boasts “over 35 IT controls and policies, including the ability to remotely wipe a smartphone and enforce and reset passwords,” which covers a variety of basic business needs, and which could be a great introduction to the hundreds of management and integration features that the full BES offers.

When you’re a BlackBerry user, you make a deal: You get speedy e-mail, good battery life and, every once in a while, your service just won’t work*. It happened again today, but as CEO Mike Lazaridis once explained, RIM has had 99.85% uptime. That’s just a bit over an hour a month if you average it out (check uptime calculations yourself).

Sure enough, today another BlackBerry outage hit, with one commentator stating it was an “epic” failure for the device line. But is it truly an epic fail?

Once we cut out definitions that have to do with literary or heroic qualities, we’re left with the following definition of “epic”:

Surpassing the usual or ordinary, particularly in scope or size:

RIM’s BlackBerry outage today was certainly large, certainly obnoxious in both scope and duration, but, as far as RIM outages go, it wasn’t surpassing the usual. If only it was an “epic” fail, than maybe BlackBerry users wouldn’t have to take these outages as part of their deal to get fast e-mail.

*Some corporate customers are exempt, as their mail is routed over BlackBerry Enterprise Server.