QNX

"A final draft of the handout circulated by e-mail to directors and advisers on January 19, 2012, began with the statement that RIM’s board, “acting on the recommendation” of Lazaridis and Balsillie, had unanimously approved Heins as the new CEO. Much of the remaining announcement praised the leadership and devotion of the departing chiefs and their courage in sacrificing short-term gains for long-term growth by acquiring QNX and its operating system. This was hardly a reassuring message to rebellious shareholders. A board faulted for deferring to CEOs would be seen to have bowed again, this time to their proposed successor, Heins, an insider who shared responsibility for PlayBook and BlackBerry 10 delays. Instead of reassuring shell-shocked shareholders that a new beginning was under way, the company chose to honor the status quo, hailing years of strategic confusion and product failures as courageous long-term vision. The approach did not sit well with at least one director. “Jesus Christ. What are we doing?” director Roger Martin fumed in a blistering e-mail reply to the company’s directors, CEOs, and advisers. The press release was doomed, he believed, by leading with Balsillie’s and Lazaridis’s recommendation for Heins, as their successor. To his mind, the proposed press release failed to send a clear message that meaningful change was occurring at the embattled company. “We have to remember shareholders are pissed,” Martin continued. “If Thorsten was so fantastic time and time again, why the huge problems at RIM, people will ask?… Let’s stop. Let’s think. Yes, there are persistent storm clouds and threats. Yes, this company is learning to be a $20 billion company. I get all that. But it doesn’t give us license to stop thinking.”"

"Yach charged his software teams to work on alternative plans. Two possible solutions emerged, neither of them ideal: Yach favored running the existing Java BlackBerry platform on top of QNX’s core technology in order to support existing apps. But many developers, including Alan Brenner, championed a different approach: tacking the BlackBerry interface on top of an Android operating system with QNX at its core. Android offered ready-made technology that would enable RIM to push out a new device to market quickly, with a running start in consumer apps, where Android was a significant player. But it would also mean apps developed for BlackBerry wouldn’t work anymore. By late 2010, Yach embraced a third option: combining RIM’s Java operating system with Android’s. Lazaridis wanted no Java on future BlackBerrys and was troubled by Android: he felt an Android BlackBerry would be less distinguishable from countless other smartphones and would be far less secure than the QNX or existing BlackBerry operating systems because Android was written using publicly available open-source code. Businesses were sure to reject it. Nevertheless, Lazaridis allowed the debate to play out for months. “There was no right answer,” says one engineer involved in the discussions. “You just needed to pick an option and run with it. There was more and more discussion about looking at options than making a decision. And making the decision wasn’t easy because ownership wasn’t there. I think the decision was clear in Mike’s mind: there was going to be a rewrite, done by brand-new people. It was probably the right decision. But the execution of that decision,” in the engineer’s view, “was done poorly.”"