Thought I would share my RIM experience. We were pressed hard by RIM developer relation team in 2006/2007 to port our highly successful Palm/WinMo app to their platform. The pitch at the time was for their developer program and attending WES, their "developer conference" which was really an IT/big company gathering. I paid close to $2k per year to be in the program. (Keep in mind this is all before the iPhone was announced and shipped.) we provided a financial tool which was a huge chunk of the RIM customer base at the time.
After a decade of Palm, WinMo and Win development I can say that the tool set and tool process were the worst I had ever experienced, even including Palm OS 1.0 releases. Code signing was a horrible pain. But my $2k bought us lots of help from their tech team, which was fantastic.
Where things fell apart was around shipping. What I thought I was getting was some tech support and marketing position, but RIM's partners were pretty much ignored and we were quickly out of the loop. There were no app stores so site placement at RIM was critical. Any mentions of partner companies were well buried on their site and every time there was a special section focused on our customer sections, we were left out.
We stayed involved for another year until RIM revamped their developer program so you had to meet certain requirements to be involved, all of which were aimed at helping RIM. You had to bring customers or come to their dev conference -- not free -- and a host of other things that would earn us points to participate. This was on top of the $2k per year to be in the program.
So while it is good to see a response from RIM so quickly, I am highly skeptical that the company can really be developer-centric and do what is right for its community. The only way they get us as a developer now is to fully support Android software as all the rumors are indicating.
After a decade of Palm, WinMo and Win development I can say that the tool set and tool process were the worst I had ever experienced, even including Palm OS 1.0 releases. Code signing was a horrible pain. But my $2k bought us lots of help from their tech team, which was fantastic.
Where things fell apart was around shipping. What I thought I was getting was some tech support and marketing position, but RIM's partners were pretty much ignored and we were quickly out of the loop. There were no app stores so site placement at RIM was critical. Any mentions of partner companies were well buried on their site and every time there was a special section focused on our customer sections, we were left out.
We stayed involved for another year until RIM revamped their developer program so you had to meet certain requirements to be involved, all of which were aimed at helping RIM. You had to bring customers or come to their dev conference -- not free -- and a host of other things that would earn us points to participate. This was on top of the $2k per year to be in the program.
So while it is good to see a response from RIM so quickly, I am highly skeptical that the company can really be developer-centric and do what is right for its community. The only way they get us as a developer now is to fully support Android software as all the rumors are indicating.