How to do things Wrong, or the Playbook. A Catharsis.

Question

Dear Blackberry, I want to talk about your little beautiful tablet: The Playbook.
This is a Catharsis, so don't take this personal, it isn't.
I have one, I found it's hardware to be incredible. The OS (2.0) it's also fast and responsive. There are several thing really well done in it: multitasking, gestures, the way to close programs, how to reset, suspend and shutdown, and many, many others.
But it have a problem, you hate your users. You hate them badly, because you don't know them, or ignore them on purpose (not sure yet).
Let's talk about what can go wrong with such a good product, because there are a few levels of wrong.
First wrong: the basic software
Let's jump to OS 2.0 directly, because thinking on a tablet without a native contacts and mail client gives me the chills.
Twitter. Amazing service eh? Even you have several accounts, in different languages and all. But you don't offer a free native twitter client. You have one, for ALL your phones, and it's good. Amazingly, you didn't port it to QNX, so we are all stuck with buying one, or use the web interface. Look at your great tablet, now grab the crappiest droid tablet with at least V2.3 of the OS. In one of those two tablets you have twitter out of the box. Hint: not in yours.
Blackberry Messenger (BBM). Again, amazing service. I think that's the single feature of your products that make you sell about 1M phones in a 40M inhabitants country, mine. Really amazing. So, if you get a Blackberry, you have it, right? No, wrong. Not with the Playbook. And you know what? That makes the Playbook a LOT less appeal to LOTS of people. Apple copied you, and released a messaging application with iOS 5, for idevices only. At the same time them where releasing a tablet with a feature that copied from you (because it's a feature that sells products), you where dumping that feature. I'm wondering if you didn't want to sell tablets, but just show off the fact that you can make one if you want.
Second wrong: connecting to PCs
As far as I've used mildly advanced devices (phones, tablets, even a Palm!) they all connected to my computer as a Massive Storage Device. At least, all of them have the option easily available (with the Palm I had to install a tiny, free, third party program). But not the Playbook. Oh no. It must do it in the most obnoxious way an intelligent (and evil) engineer can create. A virtual USB network adapter? Browse through a virtual shared folder? It's hard to imagine the creative session in which such a devilish idea was devised: “Can you do it more difficult and obscure?” “I can make it connect as a virtual USB network device, but that's too far!” “Do it! mwahahahahaha!”
So, I end up asking myself, Do you hate your users? I see that you are under heavy fire from US tech media, that clearly want you and other players (like Nokia) cold dead. I've read several reviews of your tablet and phones that didn't do justice to neither of them, but you seem to like to offer soft flanks to attacks.
Some times it looks like as YOU don't believe in YOUR OWN platform as to migrate the most basic software, How do you expect third parties to do it? Make all your software (or the most used or otherwise important) available for the Playbook and other developers will follow, no the other way around.
Reading forums and blogs I see some people believe that some of your most bizarre decisions, like the connecting to a PC monstrosity, are based in what CTOs or the like told you for security reasons. Aren't CTOs the ones happily jumping into the BYOD bandwagon because it's cheaper? Those are good clients to please while making all the others curse your ancestors, really a top notch strategic decision.
You know, this era is becoming, in certain aspects, most bottom-up than top-down. Consumer decisions are every year more based in peers than in marketing (with the admirably exception of Apple, which we can discuss other day if you want). And companies aren't in the mood to argue with their userbase, especially if that is more expensive than to let them do what they want (ie. BOYD).
Your users are the ones that uses your devices, not the ones that buys them. That leaves the CTOs and the like as an small subset of users, not the most important. If enough people in the company complains about crappy software and say that they want to use their drois or idevices for free, your CTO it's not going to argue much. And not having a native, preinstalled Twitter client, or having to go through a pain to simply connect the tablet to a PC are the kind of things about which users complain loudly.
Times are changing, so should your bussiness model. Be smart and be quick. Don't be Nokia (Who, by the way now had all their flagship phones gone obsolete in a single press conference by Microsoft. Now MS just needs to delay WP8 a few months to bring Nokia to its knees. A smart move by Nokia, huh?).
Be intelligent Blackberry, sharp your teeth and look what people will want to do with your tablet and phones and make the tablet and phones do that for them. After that, see how you can secure it to CTOs taste, but with user experience fixed in a high standard.
It's a shame to see a giant and innovative company like you struggle against your own incompetence, or the incompetence of a highly positioned moron, not sure about that. It's the same with Nokia, they can't stop shooting their feet.
Do yourself a favor, ask users what they want to do with their tablets, and make your tablets do so.
My apologizes for all the moronic errors with my English, it's not my mother tongue and my proficiency left a lot to be desired.
Greets,
Anibal

Answer 1

First, this forum is a peer to peer support community.  While RIM people do look in now and then they don't offer official support here.  It's possible some may read your post, though.
I'm going to see if I can address your main concerns:
Twitter:  There are several apps available in AppWorld.  Personally, I just use the web app supplied and it works just fine.  Additionally, you can download Android apps to your Playbook quite easily.  My favorite place to get them is from here:
http://goodereader.com/apps/playbook/playbook-andr​oid-apps/
BBM:  This service requires a BB data plan via a BlackBerry.  I bridge my PlayBook to my BlackBerry and can use BBM quite easily (though Groups are not yet supported.)
Connecting to PC:  Please download the Desktop Software from www.blackberry.com/desktop
Hopefully, this helps you some.  I much prefer my PlayBook over my iPad any day.  I have taken the time to research on the Internet and figure out how to convert my own Android apps over to PlayBook and it has given me some extra utilization.  It's not hard to do once you get everything set up.
John
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