28 ms·

It was interesting to watch the fall of Blackberry. My take was that they released a product that in a lot of people's eyes was inferior to the iPhone, so they

by wlll 7y ago

It was interesting to watch the fall of Blackberry. My take was that they released a product that in a lot of people's eyes was inferior to the iPhone, so they had to come up with a differentiator. There wasn't really any area that mattered that they were really better in, so they made something up, a lie; "Business people need real keyboards". This got them some mileage, but I don't think was ever really true. Sure, some people prefer the physical keyboard, but the huge screen with graphical OS was massively versatile. I remember hearing stories about "business" people who had their corporate blackberry, but had personally bought an iPhone aswell because they greatly preferred it. I don't know if Blackberry bought their own lie, or if they thought it would get them a bit further than it did, but as far as I can tell they never really came up with something that really was better than the iPhone. The lie was a debt they never paid back. Anyway, that was my take, looking in from the outside.

tenebrisalietum 7y ago
Blackberry was really good at email, and didn't need to be reset as often as Windows Mobile back in the day. I do remember the Blackberry taking a full two minutes to start up from a cold power-off condition. Once other phones started handling email just as well and became as reliable, Blackberry didn't have a reason to exist other than for those that wanted a basic email phone with a keyboard. The Blackberry phones I remember in the pre-2010 era were not as good for media as other phones. Of course the whole landscape changed once iPhone gained traction and Android entered the scene, I'm sure the newer Blackberrys were a bit better but by that time everyone seemed to be getting Android or iPhones. I recall Blackberry needing special phone plans as well, not sure if that still exists anymore.
- dspillett 7y ago
  > Blackberry was really good at email IIRC secure email was their USP to corporates. > and didn't need to be reset as often as Windows Mobile ... I do remember the Blackberry taking a full two minutes to start up from a cold That was true of Windows phones too, even the highish-end device I had for a fair while. > Once other phones started handling email just as well It wasn't that other devices did basic email less well, it was that they didn't make the same security claims. Once those security claims were in doubt (rightly or wrongly) other devices looked a lot less different in that regard so other factors became key to sales and the BB proposition was not as competitive in those areas. Once the "all the corporates use BB, so all the corporates use BB" bubble had broken, BB never recovered the mindshare they once had.
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  The special BIS phone plans haven't been required since BBOS7 phones. BB10 phones were released in 2013, and then Android a couple of years later.
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    BIS included various things like image compressing proxy server and so on that became less necessary as 3G improved.
candiodari 7y ago
I think you're making a mistake looking at it in isolation. Compared to the Microsoft stylus-based software keyboard, their claim "businesspeople need a physical keyboard" is not a lie. But apple's soft keyboard is VERY good. Android's ... tolerable. It became a lie.
jayd16 7y ago
What really killed Blackberry was the terrible software stack. Android and iOS felt much easier to dev in. BB fragmentation felt somehow worse than Android. If BB had reacted soon enough they could have kept developers but they didn't.
- kkarakk 7y ago
  imo bad software stacks are just a symptom of mismanagement not any real indicator of malaise. after all if your platform is popular enough you'll have devs willing to learn whatever arcane mess of a stack they have to in order to make money on it
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    There is a limit where the pain is too much. For example we tried to develop for Nokia sometime around 2000 but eventually gave up because the SDK was just too bad. It was a good platform and there would have been money in it but development was just too painful and risky. It seemed Nokia wasn’t really interested in developers despite constant reassurance from developer evangelists.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Yet people wrote J2ME apps for feature phones.....
      - jayd16 7y ago
        Is it impossible? Of course not. Is it going to foster the "app" revolution the iPhone did? Also no.
dspillett 7y ago
> "Business people need real keyboards". This got them some mileage While the keyboard was a sales win (or at least an attempted one) for the end users, their key USP for many corporates was more secure comms than other devices offered. Then there were discussions about some government agencies wanting access, and talk of some being given access in some jurisdictions in some circumstances. I'm not sure how true that talk was, but it got some peoples hackles up significantly as it implied back doors existed in the system. Then there was the infamous CEO interview walkout when a (related?) question about security was raised, which really left a bad image and killed a lot of hope the company may have had regarding getting the security reputation back. Losing that USP was, while far from the only factor, rather significant in BBs precipitous drop in popularity.
rchaud 7y ago
The real story is more complicated, and covered very well in a book called "Losing the Signal", written by journalists at the Globe & Mail. RIM had an engineering-first culture that was attuned to the needs of enterprise customers and wireless carriers first and foremost. Those customers prioritized email delivery over bandwidth-constrained mobile networks. RIM made big money off of Blackberry Enterprise Services (BES), which included dedicated servers to handle push email and compress web traffic for improved speed. When the engineer CEO Mike Lazaridis saw the iPhone, he thought it'd fail because AT&T's 2G and 3G networks would collapse trying to load desktop websites and online video. Which they did. The biggest complaint about the early iPhone in the US was that it dropped calls, and that websites loaded slowly (this was before responsive websites, srcset, CDN caching etc were common). Ultimately it didn't matter, because consumers and businesspeople wanted the iPhone and accepted the tradeoffs.
- wvenable 7y ago
  My takeaway from this other tech industry failures is to bet on Moore's law. Processors will get cheaper/faster, networks will get cheaper/faster, storage and ram, etc. Microsoft was always going to beat Palm/Symbian with Windows CE because they built a powerful multitasking OS that was terrible on the hardware of the day but the hardware got better. Palm had a super simple OS that ran great on early hardware but was quickly outclassed and they constantly struggled with modernizing it. Apple then destroyed them all by porting their desktop/server OS to mobile hardware!
- JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
  Unfortunately for Mr Lazaridis at least one thing was workable on an OG iPhone with EDGE; Email.
  - rchaud 7y ago
    I think they still had an advantage, as Blackberries had push email even on the standard BIS (not BES) service. I remember early Androids and iPhones needing to poll the email server occasionally to notify you about new emails. Switching poll frequency to every 60 seconds killed the battery, but it was the closest thing to BB's push implementation.
908B64B197 7y ago
Around 2009 at some finance firms iPhones were basically a marker of being on one of the "winning" teams. As soon as someone got a corporate iPhone everyone wanted one. I actually feel that a lot of "enterprise support" on iPhone was a side-effect of having a lot of users trying to use their personal iPhone instead of their corporate BlackBerry for work. The Keyboard thing ended-up being true for, I estimate, less then 10% of users?

by wlll 7y ago

tenebrisalietum 7y ago

Blackberry was really good at email, and didn't need to be reset as often as Windows Mobile back in the day. I do remember the Blackberry taking a full two minutes to start up from a cold power-off condition. Once other phones started handling email just as well and became as reliable, Blackberry didn't have a reason to exist other than for those that wanted a basic email phone with a keyboard. The Blackberry phones I remember in the pre-2010 era were not as good for media as other phones. Of course the whole landscape changed once iPhone gained traction and Android entered the scene, I'm sure the newer Blackberrys were a bit better but by that time everyone seemed to be getting Android or iPhones. I recall Blackberry needing special phone plans as well, not sure if that still exists anymore.

dspillett 7y ago
> Blackberry was really good at email IIRC secure email was their USP to corporates. > and didn't need to be reset as often as Windows Mobile ... I do remember the Blackberry taking a full two minutes to start up from a cold That was true of Windows phones too, even the highish-end device I had for a fair while. > Once other phones started handling email just as well It wasn't that other devices did basic email less well, it was that they didn't make the same security claims. Once those security claims were in doubt (rightly or wrongly) other devices looked a lot less different in that regard so other factors became key to sales and the BB proposition was not as competitive in those areas. Once the "all the corporates use BB, so all the corporates use BB" bubble had broken, BB never recovered the mindshare they once had.
frosted-flakes 7y ago
The special BIS phone plans haven't been required since BBOS7 phones. BB10 phones were released in 2013, and then Android a couple of years later.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  BIS included various things like image compressing proxy server and so on that became less necessary as 3G improved.

candiodari 7y ago

I think you're making a mistake looking at it in isolation. Compared to the Microsoft stylus-based software keyboard, their claim "businesspeople need a physical keyboard" is not a lie. But apple's soft keyboard is VERY good. Android's ... tolerable. It became a lie.

jayd16 7y ago

What really killed Blackberry was the terrible software stack. Android and iOS felt much easier to dev in. BB fragmentation felt somehow worse than Android. If BB had reacted soon enough they could have kept developers but they didn't.

kkarakk 7y ago
imo bad software stacks are just a symptom of mismanagement not any real indicator of malaise. after all if your platform is popular enough you'll have devs willing to learn whatever arcane mess of a stack they have to in order to make money on it
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  There is a limit where the pain is too much. For example we tried to develop for Nokia sometime around 2000 but eventually gave up because the SDK was just too bad. It was a good platform and there would have been money in it but development was just too painful and risky. It seemed Nokia wasn’t really interested in developers despite constant reassurance from developer evangelists.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Yet people wrote J2ME apps for feature phones.....
    - jayd16 7y ago
      Is it impossible? Of course not. Is it going to foster the "app" revolution the iPhone did? Also no.

dspillett 7y ago

> "Business people need real keyboards". This got them some mileage While the keyboard was a sales win (or at least an attempted one) for the end users, their key USP for many corporates was more secure comms than other devices offered. Then there were discussions about some government agencies wanting access, and talk of some being given access in some jurisdictions in some circumstances. I'm not sure how true that talk was, but it got some peoples hackles up significantly as it implied back doors existed in the system. Then there was the infamous CEO interview walkout when a (related?) question about security was raised, which really left a bad image and killed a lot of hope the company may have had regarding getting the security reputation back. Losing that USP was, while far from the only factor, rather significant in BBs precipitous drop in popularity.

rchaud 7y ago

The real story is more complicated, and covered very well in a book called "Losing the Signal", written by journalists at the Globe & Mail. RIM had an engineering-first culture that was attuned to the needs of enterprise customers and wireless carriers first and foremost. Those customers prioritized email delivery over bandwidth-constrained mobile networks. RIM made big money off of Blackberry Enterprise Services (BES), which included dedicated servers to handle push email and compress web traffic for improved speed. When the engineer CEO Mike Lazaridis saw the iPhone, he thought it'd fail because AT&T's 2G and 3G networks would collapse trying to load desktop websites and online video. Which they did. The biggest complaint about the early iPhone in the US was that it dropped calls, and that websites loaded slowly (this was before responsive websites, srcset, CDN caching etc were common). Ultimately it didn't matter, because consumers and businesspeople wanted the iPhone and accepted the tradeoffs.

wvenable 7y ago
My takeaway from this other tech industry failures is to bet on Moore's law. Processors will get cheaper/faster, networks will get cheaper/faster, storage and ram, etc. Microsoft was always going to beat Palm/Symbian with Windows CE because they built a powerful multitasking OS that was terrible on the hardware of the day but the hardware got better. Palm had a super simple OS that ran great on early hardware but was quickly outclassed and they constantly struggled with modernizing it. Apple then destroyed them all by porting their desktop/server OS to mobile hardware!
JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
Unfortunately for Mr Lazaridis at least one thing was workable on an OG iPhone with EDGE; Email.
- rchaud 7y ago
  I think they still had an advantage, as Blackberries had push email even on the standard BIS (not BES) service. I remember early Androids and iPhones needing to poll the email server occasionally to notify you about new emails. Switching poll frequency to every 60 seconds killed the battery, but it was the closest thing to BB's push implementation.

908B64B197 7y ago

Around 2009 at some finance firms iPhones were basically a marker of being on one of the "winning" teams. As soon as someone got a corporate iPhone everyone wanted one. I actually feel that a lot of "enterprise support" on iPhone was a side-effect of having a lot of users trying to use their personal iPhone instead of their corporate BlackBerry for work. The Keyboard thing ended-up being true for, I estimate, less then 10% of users?