As for Blackberry I’m pretty sure we talked about locked down devices. We have a LOT of friends in this market and many have tried BB. There is a reason though, that there are SO many great PPC developers and so few of them have BB apps. It isn’t that they can’t do it…it’s often a question of “can we sell enough to make it worth it.” And like Symbian, for most BB users, it already does everything they want. They just aren’t buying 3rd party software titles.

Ceesie:
I really wish we could tell you exactly what we’re doing or planning. A couple issues here. First things change…a lot. What looks like the best new thing today is forgotten tomorrow. We need to remain extremely flexible to stay alive (it’s part of why we are alive and so many others are gone) and we hate to say “Yep! We’ll do it!” and then go back on our word.

Secondly, secrecy is extremely valuable. We hate to see someone leave our product if we’re about to release something that would change their mind, but the cost of having a competitor beat us to the punch on something is far greater. As a company that likes to always put the customer ahead of EVERYTHING else this need really galls us, but in the 10 years that we’ve been doing this we’ve seen what happens if we telegraph our plans…it’s ugly.

First off, people with Symbian devices buy very little actual software for their phones.

Helloooo! Maybe because there’s hardly any software worth buying. More and more folks are switching over to blackberrys for their ease of use, reliability and great email capabilities. However as one who has used the others and been unhappy with the phones/platform (but happy with the available software!), I have to say that the quantity and quality of softward available for blackberry’s is sadly lacking. Reminds me of early Mac days and why I finally had to switch to the PC.

I’m not sure where you get your market research, but I would suggest that there’s a bit of chicken and egg going on here.

I do understand that to support another platform requires a capital commitment and if Ilium cannot or does not want to do so, that’s a choice.

Sure do miss ewallet and would love to have listpro on my blackberry though!

As for outsourcing, software needs maintenance. This means long term outsourcing expenses for every change that is required. In addition, it requires support. This means implementing the infrastructure to support the device. Then there is the question of testing. They build it but we test it. Adding a new platform exponentially increases our test cases.

So it isn’t that we don’t see the possibility for profit or that we don’t hope to expand to new markets in the future. The question comes down to this…to expand into a new market do we want to:

a) Pull people away from other projects to support the new market

b) Redirect finances towards a new market instead of using them to improve the product and support for our existing market

c) Obtain capital (and all the entanglements that go along with it) to allow expansion into a new market with no cost to existing products/markets

d) Go for a quantity over quality approach

Any of these or a combination of them could work, but we would have to make at least one of these decisions and at this point in our company, all of them involve sacrifices.

So…we aren’t abandoning the idea but we just don’t have a way to make it happen that we are comfortable with.

take care – good soft