RIM Co-CEO Jim Balsillie’s ‘Sweet Solution’

Claudine Beaumont, reporting for The Telegraph, on Jim Balsillie’s appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco yesterday:

He also criticised Apple’s ecosystem of applications for its iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, and said that users “don’t need an app for the web”. […]

“We believe that you can bring the mobile to the web,” he said. “You don’t need to go through some kind of software development kit. That’s the core part of our message. You can use your existing development environment.

Everyone remembers that this was Apple’s story for third-party iPhone development back in 2007, right? And that the announcement was met with dead silence — no applause whatsoever — during the WWDC keynote? And that Cocoa developers were so itching to write truly native iPhone apps that they started doing so on their own, via jailbreaking, with no help, tools, or documentation from Apple? And that when Apple was ready to release a native SDK in early 2008, that response — from both developers and consumers — was overwhelming?

My guess is that Balsillie knows this, but he’s spinning it this way because RIM is going to release the PlayBook long before its native SDK is going to be ready. And so what else is he going to say?

★ Wednesday, 17 November 2010