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I’d be afraid of Google if I had worked at Blackberry too, just look at the destruction they did.

na85 8y ago
Eh, I think blackberry's destruction was of their own making. They had a huge head start but failed to embrace apps. The onboarding process for developers was painful and their devices were chronically underpowered. They failed to read the winds of change that saw Bring Your Own Device come to the workplace and thought they were safe with enterprise and government users.
- capsulecorp 8y ago
  >The onboarding process for developers was painful and their devices were chronically underpowered. I can resonate with this. I worked for a major bank developing their blackberry app. It was amazingly painful to develop on their platform, its a literal mess.
  - realusername 8y ago
    Android wasn't that great technically at the time either, I was actively avoiding mobile app development at that time due to how crappy the SDK was, thankfully it's not that bad anymore, Google put a lot of work on Android since then but was Blackberry really worse?
    - jayd16 8y ago
      It was night and day. Imagine Android dev with worse documentation in Java 5, (somehow!) more fragmentation, less hype so less stack overflow articles but with stricter than Apple submission hoops and no xcode to help you stumble through it.
- protomyth 8y ago
  Looking back, I’m more and more convinced it was Verizon’s need for an iPhone clone that killed them. The book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry goes into a lot of detail about their decisions and that looked like the big problem. Something like the Passport earlier would have been a better bet than any Storm model.
- jayd16 8y ago
  Their developer tools were laughably painful in the iPhone age.
- 29083011397778 8y ago
  Jim Balsillie actually tried to change course, open up, and monetize BBM. He was shot down hard by the rest of the board, who thought hardware was the way to go. I can't imagine how much that would sting, considering a couple years later Whatsapp would be sold for billions. Taken from the book mentioned in the article actually, Losing the Signal, before anyone asks for a source.
  - na85 7y ago
    I was an avid bbm user and when they brought in the monetization changes I quickly grew to detest the app. If that was his vision at work, then I'm not surprised it failed. Monetized bbm was/is a spammy, irritating mess.
- otabdeveloper1 8y ago
  There's only two possible ways to survive in the commodity phone hardware world: a) Price dumping and giving out a free OS to Chinese OEM's. b) Making a "luxury" product to differentiate against Chinese OEM's. Neither of these two paths was open to Blackberry. Sorry.

na85 8y ago

Eh, I think blackberry's destruction was of their own making. They had a huge head start but failed to embrace apps. The onboarding process for developers was painful and their devices were chronically underpowered. They failed to read the winds of change that saw Bring Your Own Device come to the workplace and thought they were safe with enterprise and government users.

capsulecorp 8y ago
>The onboarding process for developers was painful and their devices were chronically underpowered. I can resonate with this. I worked for a major bank developing their blackberry app. It was amazingly painful to develop on their platform, its a literal mess.
- realusername 8y ago
  Android wasn't that great technically at the time either, I was actively avoiding mobile app development at that time due to how crappy the SDK was, thankfully it's not that bad anymore, Google put a lot of work on Android since then but was Blackberry really worse?
  - jayd16 8y ago
    It was night and day. Imagine Android dev with worse documentation in Java 5, (somehow!) more fragmentation, less hype so less stack overflow articles but with stricter than Apple submission hoops and no xcode to help you stumble through it.
protomyth 8y ago
Looking back, I’m more and more convinced it was Verizon’s need for an iPhone clone that killed them. The book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry goes into a lot of detail about their decisions and that looked like the big problem. Something like the Passport earlier would have been a better bet than any Storm model.
jayd16 8y ago
Their developer tools were laughably painful in the iPhone age.
29083011397778 8y ago
Jim Balsillie actually tried to change course, open up, and monetize BBM. He was shot down hard by the rest of the board, who thought hardware was the way to go. I can't imagine how much that would sting, considering a couple years later Whatsapp would be sold for billions. Taken from the book mentioned in the article actually, Losing the Signal, before anyone asks for a source.
- na85 7y ago
  I was an avid bbm user and when they brought in the monetization changes I quickly grew to detest the app. If that was his vision at work, then I'm not surprised it failed. Monetized bbm was/is a spammy, irritating mess.
otabdeveloper1 8y ago
There's only two possible ways to survive in the commodity phone hardware world: a) Price dumping and giving out a free OS to Chinese OEM's. b) Making a "luxury" product to differentiate against Chinese OEM's. Neither of these two paths was open to Blackberry. Sorry.