Baird: RIM Is Bleeding Developers. Don’t make me laugh

Disillusioned with repeated delays to RIM’s next-generation BlackBerry 10 operating system and the company’s ebbing smartphone market share in the U.S., some are throwing up their hands and turning away from the platform.

At least that is according to a new survey of developers by Baird Equity Research which finds dev sentiment toward BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry 7 in general at a new low.

Baird surveyed 200 developers culled from a sample set of 4,300 and found that their collective outlook for BlackBerry 10 — charted on a 10-point scale from poor to excellent — had fallen to 3.8 from 4.6 in the previous quarter. Meanwhile, their outlook for the BlackBerry 7 declined to 2.8 from 3.8.

Says Baird, “31 percent of sampled BlackBerry 10 developers said that they have shifted some or all of their work away from BB10, compared with 34 percent in Q1. This is the second quarter in which we have seen fewer responders indicating that they will shift some of their work away from BlackBerry. We believe that many developers who planned to jump ship have already made the move, leaving a BlackBerry developer base that is smaller but increasingly loyal.”

Alec Saunders, RIM’s VP Developer Relations, was extremely quick to respond to the Baird survey in a new post to the company’s Developer Blog entitled, Bleeding Developers? Far from it.

Now there will be some reading this thinking “so what, we expect that from RIM employees”.

Well I’m not a RIM employee and at Rapid Berry, we go out of our way to be completely impartial in every article that we publish.

This “news” is a total surprise to me.

Look at the figures for the current BlackBerry Jam World Tour.  They are mostly sell-outs and well documented and I don’t think I even need to go any further into that area.  Some have argued that the main reason that developers are attending the Jams are to obtain the Alpha device for free.  I’ve spoke to many, enough to know that this isn’t the case.  However, lets assume for arguments sake that it was.  Considering that the alpha device is only suitable for development and testing purposes, it’s axiomatic that if developers want the device then it’s because they want to write code for BlackBerry 10.

Being a developer, I deal with developers every single day and I’m constantly getting more and more developers involved in BlackBerry 10.  Some are reluctant at first but once I show them the tools that currently exist, run through some examples with them and leave them to digest and try it for themselves they are excited with what they’ve been shown and are excited to develop for an os platform that will change mobile industry.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that some developers do get on-board and then leave.  Of course they do but they are in the vast minority.

Stastics can be good things but they can also be extremely misleading.

Baird state they used a sample set of 200 developers out of a total of 4,300.  200 does not even represent a miniscule amount of the current amount of BlackBerry developers worldwide.   More than 200 will attend one single BlackBerry Jam session and 4,300 is an extremely tiny amount of BlackBerry developers wordlwide.  A whole lot more than that figure have attended the Jams (with still more to come).

Who were these developers?  Where do they come from?

I could go on and on but to be honest, there’s no real point.  At this point in time, this is the kind of media sensationalism that BlackBerry developers and users will have to get used to whilst BB10 is being produced.

BlackBerry developers are rising at a very steady rate and will more than likely continue to do so, despite what you may read elsewhere.