Android News
RIM buys The Astonishing Tribe, Android world softly weeps
December 2, 2010 | by Andrew Kameka
Android News
The Astonishing Tribe is responsible for some amazing concepts that people have salivated over, anxiously awaiting when we might see them pop-up in Android. We may be waiting for quite a while because RIM has acquired the Swedish design house.
RIM announced today on its BlackBerry blog that it has acquired TAT and the team will join RIM for working on its PlayBook tablet and improve the BlackBerry OS. RIM has been under criticism for failing to innovate its UI, but I doubt that will be much of a problem now.
BlackBerry’s gain sadly comes at Android’s expense. We’ve covered TAT concepts in the past and hoped to see some of them appear on Android this year. Comments made by TAT co-founder on the Engadget Show weeks ago, and a brief conversation I had with a TAT team member, led me to believe we’d see something great from TAT next year. Looks like we will, but for RIM products.
Rats.
If RIM wanted them, they can't have that much to offer. Besides, once RIM goes broke they will be free to do as they will again.
Well.. I'd have to say it can be a blessing in disguise, TAT is a very capable team with alot to offer. So if these guys go to work for RIM is is losing market share at a fairly alarming rate as compared to what they used to have. So if RIM steps up their game it can only force Google to step up theirs and we the Android community can only bennefit. If RIM does drop out of the game you know where TAT will be headed.
Re: "they can't have much to offer," TAT are the folks responsible for Android's pull-down notification bar. That's just for starters.
Pay less attention to talking heads and more attention to numbers. RIM profits are up 40% year over year. Dubbed fastest growing company in the world just a year ago by Forbes. They might be loosing market share in the US. I expect them to rebound once they have QNX going on BBs. This acquisition will be a big boost to their User Interface. If Google has 6B to spend on Groupon, they could have surely spent few millions to purchase TAT. They didn't. Mistake I say.
RIMs last stand, if they fail to increase in market share this time there done.
RIM is a pretty big company, the fact that they have lost market shares means little. Fluctuations are going to happen from year to year. A lot of people said Nintendo was at their end when Xbox and Playstation started gathering market shares. Then they rebounded with the Wii. RIM is an innovative company with a lot of buying power. I don't think they are going out anytime soon.