A theme of this year’s Blogging Idol competition has been the fortunes of Research In Motion Ltd. and its BlackBerry brand. This week’s blog entries were no different.
Contestant Michael Gerochi blogged about why he had to return the RIM’s PlayBook tablet to the store. While the poor gaming capabilities, inadequate video camera and lack of native e-mail and BlackBerry Messenger support topped his list of gripes, Gerochi couldn’t help taking shots at the device’s form factor either.
“I tried to carry my Playbook around the office, but it didn’t fit in my suit jacket and looked/felt ridiculous in my pants,” he wrote.
“So what else can I use this thing if it can’t be used for work, taking pictures, videos or gaming? Movies or listening to music? Don’t even go there with that 7-inch screen, or the wannabe ghetto blaster stereo speakers.”
Ultimately, Gerochi decided to return the device to the store.
But it wasn’t all bad news for RIM this week, at least according to Blogging Idol contestant Kevin Pashuk.
While watching CNN coverage leading up to U.S. President Barack Obama’s historic Sunday announcement about Osama bin Laden’s death, Pashuk expressed envy over Wolf Blitzer’s BlackBerry device.
“Every reporter on CNN had their Blackberry in hand, and continually monitored it, as new messages came in from ‘reliable sources,’” he wrote. “The real remarkable fact was that CNN would make these statements without any apparent fear of reprisals.”
“Wouldn’t you love to know who Wolf Blitzer has on his BBM list,” he added.
In another post this week, Pashuk revisited his “Twitter” election theory, which states that there might be a correlation between a party leader’s Twitter followers and the outcome of the election.
“Aside from wondering whether a certain former Ontario Premier was rummaging around in his drawer for the orange colour tie he used to wear, I see that my unscientific method of predicting election results using Twitter is about as accurate as every other poll,” he wrote. “Which means I have to keep the day job.”
Blogger Don Sheppard posted about Geoffrey Moore’s books on technology and innovation. In his books, Sheppard said, the “gorilla” represents a market-share leader whose position is sustained by proprietary technology that has a high switching cost.
Sheppard used the concept to tackle the question of whether there will ever be a single “gorilla” in the cloud computing industry.
“Is there an ‘architecture’ for cloud computing that someone owns or controls,” he wrote. “How easy is it to switch from one cloud supplier to another?”
Sheppard added that part of the problem these days is thinking that cloud computing is a single product type targeting a single market segment.
“That would be equivalent to saying that distributed computing is a single product meeting a single need in the marketplace,” he wrote. “Once we can identify the market requirements that cloud computing can meet, then we will be much farther along in developing the solutions, establishing standards and judging success. Only then will we get past the technology hype cycle.”
