4 ms·

I said it a decade ago, Microsoft should have either acquired RIM (Blackberry) or otherwise partnered with them to make Blackberry the canonical Microsoft phone

I said it a decade ago, Microsoft should have either acquired RIM (Blackberry) or otherwise partnered with them to make Blackberry the canonical Microsoft phone experience. If they acted fast, they could have retained a solid third place, perhaps still holding on as the handset which corporations deployed to employees. Instead, Microsoft did to the mobile phone space what Google did with messaging platforms and gave us endless cycles of killing and reinventing them, hoping maybe something would stick. By contrast it’s interesting to remember how much Apple got right with the iPhone in 2007. Many of the fundamentals of the hardware, software and UX were gotten right before Apple ever offered one to a paying customer.

simonh 5y ago
The BlackBerry software platform was even worse than the CE kernel based Windows Mobile, so I don't see how that would have helped them. The problem was they didn't have a competitive software platform ready in time. In 2007 Google's Android team was already several years into developing Android and immediately started pivoting it into a touch based modern desktop class OS in a mobile package. Microsoft didn't realise that's what they needed to do until 2010 when they started work on Windows Mobile 10. But even in 2007 it was too late. They would still have been several years behind Android and there would not have been space for a sub-par licensed OS up against a free competitor that was years in front of it. The game was already over, it just took them 10 years to realise it.