While everyone else was busy discussing the open letters sent to RIM execs and concentrating on the all the doom and gloom surrounding the situation -- one BlackBerry developer took it upon himself to write up his own open letter. Not to make the situation worse, but in an effort to show people it's not as bad as some would have you believe.

“Letter from Outer Space” was written up by a developer named Ekke over at his personal blog -- Ekkes Corner and having been a long-term BlackBerry developer Ekke highlights the many reasons he sticks with BlackBerry development and his thoughts on all these letters from purported RIM employees. Ekke touches on a lot of things in his letter and even offers his outlook on the future of RIM in a portion he titled "RIM – Research in Motion in Transition", quite fitting really.

If you've not read the letter as of yet, and are tired of all the dramatic horror stories then it is certainly a suggested read. As each day passes, more people are ready to put the final, final nail in RIM's coffin but Ekke offers a his perspective from the outside looking in -- something that more developers and users should be doing. 

Read the full version of “Letter from Outer Space”

As a long-time BlackBerry enthusiast and proud Canadian, I want to see Research In Motion turn around the negative sentiment that is now stalking them in the media and gain back the sales momentum and brand popularity they have enjoyed in the past.

But should this challenge prove too difficult in the months ahead or simply take too long to execute in the face of an eroding market cap, what will become of RIM? I've pondered this question a lot in recent weeks from every conceivable angle, and it was sitting on a patio sipping my fourth pitcher of Sangria on Canada Day that I concluded Google will buy Research In Motion. It won't be Microsoft - they've made their bet on Windows Phone and Nokia (and the Steve Ballmer at BlackBerry World thing was little more than a PR stunt). It won't be Co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis buying back the company and going private again (though I'm sure they'd love to do that). It won't be any other company seriously stepping in with a bid. It'll be Google. Keep reading for my logical reasoning.

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Following yesterday's Open Letter to RIM Sr. Management by an anonymous employee and RIM's official response to that letter, today two more letters to RIM have been posted (apparently a dozen or so were received by BGR). Here's the start of each to put them in perspective:

Letter 1: I was an employee at RIM for a year and a half. I worked in the legal and business affairs departments, and despite having originally thought I'd landed the jackpot job-wise, it took no time for me to begin planning my exodus. My first week started with a complete change in my title and duties without anyone telling me, and when I dared ask what was happening, the director (my boss) and her BFF the OD business partner ganged up on me and threatened to let me go, setting the tone for the remainder of my time there. 

Letter 2: Inside RIM there is a small-ish (maybe 200-300) group of employees who's only focus is keeping the BlackBerry services (Email, Browsing, BBM, the network, etc) running for our customers. We're a 24/7/365 organization, maintaining 10′s of thousands of servers, network devices, services and basically anything that keeps devices working with our service. Keeping this massive service running smoothly, and keeping visible downtime to a minimum is a monumental task, made worse by the poor management decisions we deal with every day.

Overall it's mainly more of the same... not great to read from the perspective of a BlackBerry fan, but it is what it is. At this point I think RIM's issues are pretty well known to everybody. What matters now is where RIM goes from here. Oh, and for what it's worth, I hate blogging stuff like this... if any more letters get posted I'll think Ill just leave them to be discussed in the CrackBerry forums.  Let me know what you think of that notion in the comments. 

Read More: BGR

By now, I'm sure everyone who cared enough to read the open letter to RIM has done so. But in regards to that open letter, RIM has now posted up their official response:

An “Open Letter” to RIM’s senior management was published anonymously on the web today and it was attributed to an unnamed person described as a ‘high level employee”. It is obviously difficult to address anonymous commentary and it is particularly difficult to believe that a “high level employee” in good standing with the company would choose to anonymously publish a letter on the web rather than engage their fellow executives in a constructive manner, but regardless of whether the letter is real, fake, exaggerated or written with ulterior motivations, it is fair to say that the senior management team at RIM is nonetheless fully aware of and aggressively addressing both the company’s challenges and its opportunities.

RIM recently confirmed that it is nearing the end of a major business and technology transition. Although this transition has taken longer than anticipated, there is much excitement and optimism within the company about the new products that are lined up for the coming months. There is a fundamental business reality however that following an extended period of hyper growth (during which RIM nearly quadrupled in size over the past 5 years alone), it has become necessary for the company to streamline its operations in order to allow it to grow its business profitably while pursuing newer strategic opportunities. Again, RIM’s management team takes these challenges seriously and is actively addressing the situation. The company is thankfully in a solid business and financial position to tackle the opportunities ahead with a solid balance sheet (nearly $3 billion in cash and no debt), strong profitability (RIM’s net income last quarter was $695 million) and substantial international growth (international revenue in Q1 grew 67% over the same quarter last year). In fact, while growth has slowed in the US, RIM still shipped 13.2 million BlackBerry smartphones last quarter (which is about 100 smartphones per minute, 24 hours per day) and RIM is more committed than ever to serving its loyal customers and partners around the world.

We won't make any attempts to read into the information here, instead feel free to leave comments with your thoughts on their response.

Source: Inside BlackBerry

And the RIMAGEDDON saga continues... this time in the form of an anonymous letter sent into BGR by a fairly high-ranking RIM employee. The intent of the letter? To catch senior managements' attention and make some changes around there. Here's a couple of paragraphs picked from the full letter:

We are in the middle of major "transition" and things have never been more chaotic. Almost every project is falling further and further behind schedule at a time when we absolutely must deliver great, solid products on time. We urge you to make bold decisions about our organisational structure, about our culture and most importantly our products.

RIM has a lot of people who underperform but still stay in their roles. No one is accountable. Where is the guy responsible for the 9530 software? Still with us, still running some important software initiative. We will never achieve excellence with this culture. Just because someone may have been a loyal RIM employee for 7 years, it doesn't mean they are the best Manager / Director / VP for that role. It's time to change the culture to deliver or move on and get out. We have far too many people in critical roles that fit this description. I can hear the cheers of my fellow employees now. 

For the full letter you can jump over to BGR at the link below. Be sure to jump back here and sound off with your comments. It touches base on a lot of good points, from the culture to some of the (bad) decisions that have been over the years and points out where some of the big problems in the organization lie.

It's funny, over the last few months I've been contemplating fairly regularly about writing an Open Letter to RIM here on the CrackBerry blogs. I've actually had a lot of you email or tweet or PM me that I should do one of these. I've stopped myself though, because the realization I keep coming back to is that it honestly doesn't serve a USEFUL purpose.  An open letter to RIM makes the assumption that RIM's senior employees and the CEO's don't have a clue as to what's going on around them. Trust me, THEY KNOW. They're not stupid. I guarantee there's not one thing in this open letter that RIM's CEOs and top management don't already know and haven't thought about. If I thought I could tell RIM management in an open letter something truly useful, I'd have done it already. 

What makes me exceedingly frustrated though, is that if knowing is half the battle (thanks GI Joe!), and I believe RIM already knows all this, the other half is action. From an outsiders perspective, I can't see the action RIM is taking inside the company. I would hope and expect that RIM is in full force action mode right now. But from this employee perspective, it starts to become more clear that RIM isn't doing enough, soon enough. And that, my BlackBerry friends, is NOT cool. I say RIMAGEDDON jokingly.. I DO NOT want to see it become a reality.  Come on RIM!!

Read the Full Open Letter to RIM

I much prefer to cover happy news stories related to BlackBerry phones, tablets, apps, games, accessories, etc. here on CrackBerry, but as the #1 Site for BlackBerry Users and Abusers we wouldn't be doing our jobs if we didn't also report back on at least some of the business stories related to Research In Motion that are taking place. Unfortunately, in the wake of their Q1 2012 Earnings, it has mainly been doom and gloom stories.

Despite their share price taking a tumble, I still have high hopes on the product development and sales front that RIM will plough through this transition and bring to market some killer new BlackBerry devices that will silence the hateration and kickstart the BlackBerry love again (and hopefully steepen their growth curve - remember, RIM is still growing... just not as fast as the street thinks they should be relative to the competition). But as if the the technical transition RIM is working through were not challenge enough, what I'm worried now makes the challenge even greater is the hostile investor and media environment RIM is now facing. Seriously, I'm not sure I've come across any stories written positively about RIM or BlackBerry in the last few weeks (if you have, drop the urls in the comments so I can check them out!). Heck, I've even coined the term and hashtag #RIMAGEDDON to sum it all up.

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Reflecting upon Thursday evening's RIM Q1 Results and earnings call, the pieces finally fell into place so we can more accurately tell the story of why it is taking so long for RIM to bring the BlackBerry Bold 9900/9930 and other next-generation BlackBerry Smartphones to market.

On the historic call, which featured both Co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis delivering the results commentary and tag teaming the Q&A period, the following was what Mike had to offer in regards to the lull in new BlackBerry phones:

We were already well down a development path to the next-generation BlackBerry handsets when we realized that in the US the features and performance arms race demanded that we upgrade the chipset and port BlackBerry to a higher-performance platform. This was an engineering change that affected hardware and software timelines and pushed out entry into carrier certification labs.

It's only two short sentences, but if you've followed the BlackBerry development path for a few years there's a lot you can gather from them. Specifically, Mike is saying that devices like the new BlackBerry Bold 9900 at their design inception were not originally intended to get the 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset that they are going to launch with. That makes sense considering we've been hearing about devices like Magnum and Onyx III since before that chipset even existed.

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As we sat in the the Research In Motion First Quarter Fiscal 2012 earnings call today, Mike Lazaridis took the time today to address the concerns surrounding delays with new BlackBerry smartphones. Some of the highlights from that call can be found below:

RIM realized through their product development that consumer demand had shifted, and as such -- required new hardware and new chip sets to be adapted to the BlackBerry platform in order to stay competitive.

With the launch of the BlackBerry PlayBook, RIM put resources forward to that launch and working on the QNX OS -- given the time frames needed, if QNX was to be ported to BlackBerry Smartphones it would have left RIM with no smartphone lineup for all of 2011.

Technical carrier acceptance was an issue at the time, and things have moved slowly in that area. Once one device meets carrier requirements -- all devices running the same OS (BlackBerry 7) should see rapid acceptance and ultimately release.

Looking at the information provided on the call, RIM was deep into their development cycle but then realized the shift in the smartphone market and as such, needed to adjust their upcoming line-up. This took time, which in turn also took more time to due the need of meeting carrier demands as well. But, the devices are coming and once they start rolling out, they will all be rolled out together rather then a staggered release.

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