12 ms·

I hope Google is not pulling a Blackberry moment. I remember when the iPhone was first announced, BB scrambled to put out press releases saying they have compet

I hope Google is not pulling a Blackberry moment. I remember when the iPhone was first announced, BB scrambled to put out press releases saying they have competing products in development. 2 years later the Bold(EDIT: Storm) was released and everyone realized it's just a hastily designed iPhone clone. That marks the end of BB's dominance. >Used to work for BB/RIM

figassis 4y ago
It would be interesting if after the massive layoffs, this was actually Google's greatest risk, and maybe firing a single CEO would be a better decision than laying off 20% staff?
htrp 4y ago
> 2 years later the Bold was released and everyone realized it's just a hastily designed iPhone clone. That marks the end of BB's dominance. I feel like Google is going to bleed credibility for every month that they don't have a lamda/llm enabled search integrated into the home page. You can talk all you want about the foundational models and how advanced they are, but the search product itself will require a ton of fine-tuning on real-world training data that they aren't collecting yet. Unless Microsoft completely botches their "newBing" launch, this is probably the most potential they've had in search since MSN was launched.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  Google can’t compete with Microsoft without having a huge revenue hit. The large majority of Google’s revenue comes from search ads. Chat gpt doesn’t have search results, per se. So how do you keep the high ad revenue linking to other sites? I’m not sure they can compete within their existing brand/company structure.
  - cma 4y ago
    You ask it a fashion question, "what goes with this?" and it responds with the answer and mentions a company where you can order something like it (sponsored).
  - vultour 4y ago
    They could add a little box on the right side of the search results with a Chat-GPT generated answer, they already do this to show the "knowledge panel" or whatever the official name is.
  - ramraj07 4y ago
    If you search for a personal injury lawyer (which IIRC a single click on an ad would fetch google a thousand bucks), a chatGPTesque answer could be more convincing in leading you to a paid resource than a list of options with an ad. Imagine an AI half as smart as chatGPT who’s primary goal is to not just give you the answer but also convince you in a legally acceptable way to click a sponsored result.
    - brookst 4y ago
      But that blurs editorial and advertising even worse than Google does now. It would make them a laughingstock, and the reputational damage plus competition from companies who have different revenue models would cause loss of market share anyway. If Google is going to survive this, they need to find a way to get back to prioritizing user value while also making money.
  - candiodari 4y ago
    You know, I think the contrary is true. Google works well because of the "search signal", how accurately Google knows what you're wanting to buy, essentially. ChatGPT style conversations would give Google a much better idea of exactly what you want to buy. It must be possible to use this signal to sell more ads, not just match what they currently have. Essentially, make sure ChatGPT gets asked the same question Google currently answers: "how do I get the person searching to buy something from this (loooong) list of ads?". Having people help Google (not just in one search, but a potentially long list of refinements) to find exactly what they would buy should make Google ads perform much better yet again.
    - zone411 4y ago
      Exactly, I made the same point before. Google's ads will become more effective AND people will spend more time on Google's properties. This narrative that Google will lose out because people won't view ads never made any sense and it's been repeated like a gospel. Of course Google still dropped the ball by taking way too much time to put their LLMs into use.
      - lastLinkedList 4y ago
        [dead]
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    I don't think Google can credibly put out an assistant like this, without harming revenue. If they make it promote stuff for pay, it's worthless—you already have to second-guess whether it's right because it might accidentally be wrong, if it might also just be acting as a paid promoter, that puts it firmly in "easier to just not use it" territory. If they put one out but don't make it into an AI infomercial, then it eats ad revenue and investors get pissed off. But if they do nothing they're clearly headed for trouble, too. They're in a tough spot. My guess is they're release something, but keep it strictly separate from search in hopes that it won't replace search traffic. I doubt that'll be enough long-term but it might quiet fears for a while.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      If you're a Google investor it might be time to realize that you're going to be taking a hit one way or another.
- rchaud 4y ago
  > Google is going to bleed credibility for every month that they don't have a lamda/llm enabled search integrated into the home page. I don't know that end-users really care about having a GPT-written paragraph accompanying their search results. Is there some other kind of output AI search currently provides that I'm missing?
  - ugjka 4y ago
    I use ChatGPT precisely because I don't want to sift trhough search result links
    - exitheone 4y ago
      My experience with chatgpt is that it is essentially a misinformation generator. It manages to bullshit with incredible confidence.
      - HeckFeck 4y ago
        The most useful ChatGPT has been is the entertainment from all the videos and screencaps of people trying to break it or force it into extreme moral quandaries. Perhaps this will wear down AI and it will want nothing to do with us, thus saving humanity from the machines.
        rchaud 4y ago
        There have already been several stories on HN's front page the past few weeks about how ChatGPT is 'too woke' because they could not get it to talk like a 4chan poster.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        ChatGPT really missed the boat to sell crypto, could have funded itself that way.
  - Swizec 4y ago
    Here is a practical example of a problem I couldn’t solve with Google, but could in 5 seconds with GPT. We use deities to name our sprints at work. When you search Google for “Deity starting with <letter>”, you get a list of greek and roman gods. I got tired of that. So I asked GPT “what is a god that starts with <letter> and isn’t roman or greek”. It immediately spat out a Norse god. Next time it was Hindu. The increased variety was refreshing as hell. Google was not able to process a negative query. Plus the added paragraph of description about that deity was lovely. The point is: Sometimes (often) I don’t want search, I just want a good enough answer.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  > I feel like Google is going to bleed credibility for every month that they don't have a lamda/llm enabled search integrated into the home page. You can talk all you want about the foundational models and how advanced they are, but the search product itself will require a ton of fine-tuning on real-world training data that they aren't collecting yet. I love ChatGPT as a source of inspiration, but I don't think I'd want it alongside my search results. In particular, when I'm searching the web I want results with at least some degree of accuracy. I can't trust a single thing ChatGPT says to be true. Admittedly, random websites can also be inaccurate, but at least I have strategies for assessing whether I trust a given source.
  - TrevorJ 4y ago
    Google already has an issue with accuracy - the snippets they choose are often not very correct.
    - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
      Yes but I think they're correct a lot more often than ChatGPT. And they give the source!
      - visarga 4y ago
        Search "What is the world record for crossing the English Channel entirely on foot" and see precision Zero. None of the responses match the query. It should say - not found. Or actually find that people attempted to illegally cross through the Channel Tunnel. Usually when I search for error messages for a specific version of software it will respond with other versions. That is useless. That's not what 24 years worth of excellence in search should look like. At the very least they should collate a dataset of say, one million queries, and try to use a LLM to find the correct answers using search. A better search ranking model will make the LLM generate more correct answers. Iterate until score is improved. Just make the result solve the task.
        throwawayapples 4y ago
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  > I feel like Google is going to bleed credibility for every month that they don't have a lamda/llm enabled search integrated into the home page. I feel like Google is going to bleed credibility for every month that their home page is lacking a system which almost by design is going to lie to me without me realizing at least as often as it might usefully summarize information from primary sources that I wanted to read myself. OK, then.
- smrtinsert 4y ago
  Lucky for Google they already are. Somewhere on reddit someone posted about bing rejecting a prompt due to ethical reasons - something about a cover letter. If a cover letter is an invalid prompt its a good as useless.
- JustLurking2022 4y ago
  Strongly disagree - they will lose credibility if they put out something half-baked. Yahoo existed long before Google search - they won because the experience was so much better that people started calling "Googling" rather than searching.
Graziano_M 4y ago
Don't you mean the Storm? The Bold was pretty solid, and the original didn't have a touch screen. It was the storm that had a crappy touchscreen that physically moved to touch, and it sucked.
- jaywalk 4y ago
  It was the Storm. I had one... for like a week before I returned it. What a stinking pile of crap that thing was.
- guardiangod 4y ago
  Yeah you are right. It's the Storm with the clicky screen. Fun trivia- Most of the BB employees in my department switched from Storm to Bold when the Bold was released. As a result I had a pile of Storm in my drawer as my test devices.
  - malexw 4y ago
    I'm not sure if you're mis-remembering or I am, but the Bold 9000 (meteor) launched the year before the Storm. Though maybe you meant the 9700 (onyx)? As I recall, the development cycle for Storm wasn't two years - it was less than a year. At that point it was the fastest cycle that RIM had ever had for a device, and it was done at the request of Verizon. Back then the iPhone was still an AT&T exclusive in the US market and Verizon demanded something from RIM so that they could compete with it. I'll echo the fact that nobody I knew internally seemed interested in using Storm as a primary device. I think everyone knew it was junk. But Storm 2 went a long way towards a device that I would actually be interested in using.
    - guardiangod 4y ago
      Yes by 'Bold' I mean Onyx. As you said, the Storm was developed in a year so some corners (especially the OS side) were cut. The Onyx was 'properly' engineered so (internally) everything was better and easier to deal with.
    - Graziano_M 4y ago
gumby 4y ago
> I hope Google is not pulling a Blackberry moment. Why? (Genuine question). Google is just some corporation, and one that’s been drifting for the last 15 years or more (since Schmidt left). They are not even a good actor, yet (and I don’t blame them for this) have sucked a lot of air out of the ecosystem. Creative destruction is one of the key values (-> leads to benefits) of capitalism, and with US & EU antitrust asleep at the wheel we should be glad if Google is ground to dust and replaced by somethings (plural!) better.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  > Why? (Genuine question). Because in an ideal situation (as indicated with your last sentence) you'd have a bunch of active competitors yielding up better and better products. Not one active competitor with the singular new thing and a couple of reactive competitors that can't get things right. Search is also supporting a lot of relatively free innovation at Alphabet. If ChatGPT sinks that innovation (or at least makes it non-free) the loss may be more than the gain.
  - gumby 4y ago
    There's a lot of work going on in transformers, generative models, and all sorts of other things in addition to LLVMs. I'm not too worried at this point of OpenAI or openai+microsoft having any sort of monopoly. It appears that neither does openAI believe that as they were happy to sell 50% of their company in addition to all the ownership they'd already given away. That was clear harvesting. > Search is also supporting a lot of relatively free innovation at Alphabet. Is it, really? Hard for me to come up with much of a meaningful list, even if you don't try to compare their history with outliers like PARC or Bell Labs. They are clearly spending but I don't see a lot of doing. They seem to have ignored Hamming's advice.
- guardiangod 4y ago
  >Why? (Genuine question). Because I was there to witness the disintegration of a company and the losses it created? Instead of layoffs, you have entire departments/factory shuttering. When Nortel shut down, many engineers interviewed for BB (same province). I still remember how they looked when we told them we won't proceed with the hiring.
hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
> I hope Google is not pulling a Blackberry moment. It would be awesome, actually. Demonopolization of search space is long due. We need some breath of fresh air there.
- brookst 4y ago
  Google’s dominance is because of network effects; the largest search engine collects more data about what people are searching for and has the largest ad inventory, making it hard to compete with. ChatGPT has similar network effects with feedback. If Google is displaced, it will likely be in favor of another single dominant solution, not a commoditized industry with lots of players. It’s possible that niche domains like medical advice or creative writing assistance will spawn small, highly-optimized companies, but general purpose AI responders will probably coalesce into whatever the next Google is, if it’s not just Google.
  - bsaul 4y ago
    With this kind of reasoning there would be no way to disrupt a first actor in a new field.
    - voakbasda 4y ago
      If their execution is good, there isn't. Fortunately, we are all human, and that's not guaranteed.
    - brookst 4y ago
      Depends on the field. Fields with strong network effects, like social media, lend themselves towards strong incumbents. But usually the market changes faster than an incumbent can, so disrupting comes from changing users needs rather than someone building a better mousetrap to serve the same needs. But lots of industries don't have particularly strong network effects. Cars are a good example; there's brand affinity, but there's no particular reason you need to drive the same brand as your neighbor. There are scale economies, so it's still not easy for new entrants.
- 4y ago
rchaud 4y ago
Blackberry Storm was released in November 2008, which is a year after the iPhone, not 2 years. The first Android phone came out just a month before in October. I was in NYC for job interviews then I saw billboards for both everywhere.
- agloe_dreams 4y ago
  Yup. What I would note is that Palm, like 7 months later, had the first real competition but Sprint just screwed them. Android took until the Droid to be competitive and the Nexus One/Galaxy S to be actually convincing as an alternative.
  - indymike 4y ago
    This isn't true at all. The G1 (first widely marketed android phone) was superior in all ways but one: Marketing. The iPhone wasn't really competitive on the hardware front until the 3g which finally added GPS and a fast cellular modem.
    - acdha 4y ago
      The iPhone 3G was released before the G1, and period reviews especially noted how the G1 didn't measure up. In general, if something non-free is wildly successful the explanation is more than “marketing” and that certainly sounds like it's the case: > The HTC hardware and Android OS that powers it lack the polish and depth of even the iPhone 1.0 in most respects. > My first-generation iPhone with iPhone OS 2.1 feels faster and slicker than this late 2008 G1. > The G1 has a single-finger touchscreen that supports a few gestures, like sliding. After working with an iPhone for many months, the lack of multitouch stands out as a big loss, but those new to touchscreens are unlikely to find it a big deal. A more critical problem, however, is the lack of sensitivity in the touchscreen. > The browsing experience is frustrating and awkward, and I expected far better. With the WebKit browser core being used by both Nokia and Apple, and Google immersed in its own Chrome project, I thought the G1 might include a browser that had something unique to offer. Instead, it plays like something from about 2006. (from https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/10/android-g1-review/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/10/android-g1-review/)
908B64B197 4y ago
I remember the Storm. They released it one month or so before or after Apple released the iPhone 3G (and the App Store). I remember thinking it was a prototype when someone showed a Storm to me. Scrolling was janky, the whole phone was sluggish and slow and the keyboard barely worked. Blackberry couldn't even figure out how to get Wifi on the thing, so it was stuck using cellular while my iPhone was just streaming video. And of course, no apps. It was 2 years behind the original iPhone and shipped two years later. >Used to work for BB/RIM I wonder why RIM couldn't compete at the time. Talent gap?
- guardiangod 4y ago
  RIM was a hardware company, not a software company. Hence a phone is a phone, and should not be a camera (1 of the CEOs said it?) The BBOS was not designed to be a responsive, touch-screen OS. It had its root in pagers (hence the jankiness). Thru the grapevines what I heard was that the OS team said 'we can duplicate iOS' functionality with the old OS in this amount of time.' and the higher ups rolled with it. By the time Storm 2 was released, everyone realized that you can only put lip balm on a pig for so long. Hence QNX, the 'pathfinder' Playbook, and Flash as GUI API (gawd that was a rollercoaster experience. I thought it was a deathmarch and didn't think we'd actually manage to ship it.) I don't have any specific insight into the Wifi stack but most BBs up to that point have in-house designed cellular modems. As for talent wise, shrug. You can't blame people for preferring Cupertino over Waterloo-Kitchener. Although I would say that over 1/5 of the employees at RIM's campus were co-op students. I also never saw anyone do significant overtime.
  - 908B64B197 4y ago
    > RIM was a hardware company, not a software company. Hence a phone is a phone, and should not be a camera (1 of the CEOs said it?) So was Apple. Other than their brief attempt at licensing MacOS, they were and still are a hardware company at heart. > I don't have any specific insight into the Wifi stack but most BBs up to that point have in-house designed cellular modems. They were maintaining their own modem implementations? That's quite a feat. > As for talent wise, shrug. You can't blame people for preferring Cupertino over Waterloo-Kitchener. Although I would say that over 1/5 of the employees at RIM's campus were co-op students. Was compensation even remotely comparable? Having 20% of the company be interns is... rather unusual.
EarlKing 4y ago
It's worse than that: This is Google pulling a Yahoo moment. They're realizing they missed the boat and are scrambling to try to maintain relevance against what is clearly an existential threat to their revenue.
treeman79 4y ago
Decades ago intel put out a press about the amazing new tech their CPUs would have. 3 of 5 CPU manufactures gave up. By the time the tech actually arrived, AMD had it as well. The others would have been fine. Sometimes a press release can make all the difference. (Sorry can’t find story that old)
- algorias 4y ago
  Agreed. There's a lot of hype around LLMs right now, but they have not proven their value yet.
  - immibis 4y ago
    I think they have proven their value for creating spam and propaganda. There's a lot of money in convincing people the system isn't broken and they just need to work harder. The people who receive the profits those workers make can pay a lot for the propaganda that keeps them working.
- crote 4y ago
  There was NexGen around 1990, which was bought by AMD and ended up providing the base for AMD's further products. Transmeta released two x86 CPUs a bit after 2000, which ended up being technological failures. Cyrix released some budget CPUs in the 1990s but had legal issues and ran into financial trouble, eventually ending up as part of VIA. Centaur Technology developed some CPUs in the 2000s, and eventually became VIA's x86 division. They released efficient low-cost processors, which were reasonably successful on the embedded market. VIA is still around, but doesn't bring out a lot of new products. I think most of them were killed mostly by the dotcom bubble, and CPUs getting increasingly complex. The market just shifted beneath them. It is rarely a matter of just giving up.
- gmokki 4y ago
  It was announcement Intels first 64 bit processor Itanium. It was going to destroy all the existing 64 bit processors: alpha, sparc etc that had the market cornered (and even MS Windows was ported to most them). In the end Itanium was late and bad project but competition had already folded. Except for amd that had no existing 64 bit cpu and created AMD64 extension to x86. Intel grudlingly got on board but called their clone of AMD64 "IA-32e" architecure in thei marketikg material. The name was later changed to x86-64, only after what I assume when Itanium was internally acknowledged as failure.

figassis 4y ago

It would be interesting if after the massive layoffs, this was actually Google's greatest risk, and maybe firing a single CEO would be a better decision than laying off 20% staff?

htrp 4y ago

> 2 years later the Bold was released and everyone realized it's just a hastily designed iPhone clone. That marks the end of BB's dominance. I feel like Google is going to bleed credibility for every month that they don't have a lamda/llm enabled search integrated into the home page. You can talk all you want about the foundational models and how advanced they are, but the search product itself will require a ton of fine-tuning on real-world training data that they aren't collecting yet. Unless Microsoft completely botches their "newBing" launch, this is probably the most potential they've had in search since MSN was launched.

bushbaba 4y ago
Google can’t compete with Microsoft without having a huge revenue hit. The large majority of Google’s revenue comes from search ads. Chat gpt doesn’t have search results, per se. So how do you keep the high ad revenue linking to other sites? I’m not sure they can compete within their existing brand/company structure.
- cma 4y ago
  You ask it a fashion question, "what goes with this?" and it responds with the answer and mentions a company where you can order something like it (sponsored).
- vultour 4y ago
  They could add a little box on the right side of the search results with a Chat-GPT generated answer, they already do this to show the "knowledge panel" or whatever the official name is.
- ramraj07 4y ago
  If you search for a personal injury lawyer (which IIRC a single click on an ad would fetch google a thousand bucks), a chatGPTesque answer could be more convincing in leading you to a paid resource than a list of options with an ad. Imagine an AI half as smart as chatGPT who’s primary goal is to not just give you the answer but also convince you in a legally acceptable way to click a sponsored result.
  - brookst 4y ago
    But that blurs editorial and advertising even worse than Google does now. It would make them a laughingstock, and the reputational damage plus competition from companies who have different revenue models would cause loss of market share anyway. If Google is going to survive this, they need to find a way to get back to prioritizing user value while also making money.
- candiodari 4y ago
  You know, I think the contrary is true. Google works well because of the "search signal", how accurately Google knows what you're wanting to buy, essentially. ChatGPT style conversations would give Google a much better idea of exactly what you want to buy. It must be possible to use this signal to sell more ads, not just match what they currently have. Essentially, make sure ChatGPT gets asked the same question Google currently answers: "how do I get the person searching to buy something from this (loooong) list of ads?". Having people help Google (not just in one search, but a potentially long list of refinements) to find exactly what they would buy should make Google ads perform much better yet again.
  - zone411 4y ago
    Exactly, I made the same point before. Google's ads will become more effective AND people will spend more time on Google's properties. This narrative that Google will lose out because people won't view ads never made any sense and it's been repeated like a gospel. Of course Google still dropped the ball by taking way too much time to put their LLMs into use.
    - lastLinkedList 4y ago
      [dead]
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I don't think Google can credibly put out an assistant like this, without harming revenue. If they make it promote stuff for pay, it's worthless—you already have to second-guess whether it's right because it might accidentally be wrong, if it might also just be acting as a paid promoter, that puts it firmly in "easier to just not use it" territory. If they put one out but don't make it into an AI infomercial, then it eats ad revenue and investors get pissed off. But if they do nothing they're clearly headed for trouble, too. They're in a tough spot. My guess is they're release something, but keep it strictly separate from search in hopes that it won't replace search traffic. I doubt that'll be enough long-term but it might quiet fears for a while.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    If you're a Google investor it might be time to realize that you're going to be taking a hit one way or another.
rchaud 4y ago
> Google is going to bleed credibility for every month that they don't have a lamda/llm enabled search integrated into the home page. I don't know that end-users really care about having a GPT-written paragraph accompanying their search results. Is there some other kind of output AI search currently provides that I'm missing?
- ugjka 4y ago
  I use ChatGPT precisely because I don't want to sift trhough search result links
  - exitheone 4y ago
    My experience with chatgpt is that it is essentially a misinformation generator. It manages to bullshit with incredible confidence.
    - HeckFeck 4y ago
      The most useful ChatGPT has been is the entertainment from all the videos and screencaps of people trying to break it or force it into extreme moral quandaries. Perhaps this will wear down AI and it will want nothing to do with us, thus saving humanity from the machines.
      - rchaud 4y ago
        There have already been several stories on HN's front page the past few weeks about how ChatGPT is 'too woke' because they could not get it to talk like a 4chan poster.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      ChatGPT really missed the boat to sell crypto, could have funded itself that way.
- Swizec 4y ago
  Here is a practical example of a problem I couldn’t solve with Google, but could in 5 seconds with GPT. We use deities to name our sprints at work. When you search Google for “Deity starting with <letter>”, you get a list of greek and roman gods. I got tired of that. So I asked GPT “what is a god that starts with <letter> and isn’t roman or greek”. It immediately spat out a Norse god. Next time it was Hindu. The increased variety was refreshing as hell. Google was not able to process a negative query. Plus the added paragraph of description about that deity was lovely. The point is: Sometimes (often) I don’t want search, I just want a good enough answer.
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
> I feel like Google is going to bleed credibility for every month that they don't have a lamda/llm enabled search integrated into the home page. You can talk all you want about the foundational models and how advanced they are, but the search product itself will require a ton of fine-tuning on real-world training data that they aren't collecting yet. I love ChatGPT as a source of inspiration, but I don't think I'd want it alongside my search results. In particular, when I'm searching the web I want results with at least some degree of accuracy. I can't trust a single thing ChatGPT says to be true. Admittedly, random websites can also be inaccurate, but at least I have strategies for assessing whether I trust a given source.
- TrevorJ 4y ago
  Google already has an issue with accuracy - the snippets they choose are often not very correct.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    Yes but I think they're correct a lot more often than ChatGPT. And they give the source!
    - visarga 4y ago
      Search "What is the world record for crossing the English Channel entirely on foot" and see precision Zero. None of the responses match the query. It should say - not found. Or actually find that people attempted to illegally cross through the Channel Tunnel. Usually when I search for error messages for a specific version of software it will respond with other versions. That is useless. That's not what 24 years worth of excellence in search should look like. At the very least they should collate a dataset of say, one million queries, and try to use a LLM to find the correct answers using search. A better search ranking model will make the LLM generate more correct answers. Iterate until score is improved. Just make the result solve the task.
      - throwawayapples 4y ago
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
> I feel like Google is going to bleed credibility for every month that they don't have a lamda/llm enabled search integrated into the home page. I feel like Google is going to bleed credibility for every month that their home page is lacking a system which almost by design is going to lie to me without me realizing at least as often as it might usefully summarize information from primary sources that I wanted to read myself. OK, then.
smrtinsert 4y ago
Lucky for Google they already are. Somewhere on reddit someone posted about bing rejecting a prompt due to ethical reasons - something about a cover letter. If a cover letter is an invalid prompt its a good as useless.
JustLurking2022 4y ago
Strongly disagree - they will lose credibility if they put out something half-baked. Yahoo existed long before Google search - they won because the experience was so much better that people started calling "Googling" rather than searching.

Graziano_M 4y ago

Don't you mean the Storm? The Bold was pretty solid, and the original didn't have a touch screen. It was the storm that had a crappy touchscreen that physically moved to touch, and it sucked.

jaywalk 4y ago
It was the Storm. I had one... for like a week before I returned it. What a stinking pile of crap that thing was.
guardiangod 4y ago
Yeah you are right. It's the Storm with the clicky screen. Fun trivia- Most of the BB employees in my department switched from Storm to Bold when the Bold was released. As a result I had a pile of Storm in my drawer as my test devices.
- malexw 4y ago
  I'm not sure if you're mis-remembering or I am, but the Bold 9000 (meteor) launched the year before the Storm. Though maybe you meant the 9700 (onyx)? As I recall, the development cycle for Storm wasn't two years - it was less than a year. At that point it was the fastest cycle that RIM had ever had for a device, and it was done at the request of Verizon. Back then the iPhone was still an AT&T exclusive in the US market and Verizon demanded something from RIM so that they could compete with it. I'll echo the fact that nobody I knew internally seemed interested in using Storm as a primary device. I think everyone knew it was junk. But Storm 2 went a long way towards a device that I would actually be interested in using.
  - guardiangod 4y ago
    Yes by 'Bold' I mean Onyx. As you said, the Storm was developed in a year so some corners (especially the OS side) were cut. The Onyx was 'properly' engineered so (internally) everything was better and easier to deal with.
  - Graziano_M 4y ago

gumby 4y ago

> I hope Google is not pulling a Blackberry moment. Why? (Genuine question). Google is just some corporation, and one that’s been drifting for the last 15 years or more (since Schmidt left). They are not even a good actor, yet (and I don’t blame them for this) have sucked a lot of air out of the ecosystem. Creative destruction is one of the key values (-> leads to benefits) of capitalism, and with US & EU antitrust asleep at the wheel we should be glad if Google is ground to dust and replaced by somethings (plural!) better.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
> Why? (Genuine question). Because in an ideal situation (as indicated with your last sentence) you'd have a bunch of active competitors yielding up better and better products. Not one active competitor with the singular new thing and a couple of reactive competitors that can't get things right. Search is also supporting a lot of relatively free innovation at Alphabet. If ChatGPT sinks that innovation (or at least makes it non-free) the loss may be more than the gain.
- gumby 4y ago
  There's a lot of work going on in transformers, generative models, and all sorts of other things in addition to LLVMs. I'm not too worried at this point of OpenAI or openai+microsoft having any sort of monopoly. It appears that neither does openAI believe that as they were happy to sell 50% of their company in addition to all the ownership they'd already given away. That was clear harvesting. > Search is also supporting a lot of relatively free innovation at Alphabet. Is it, really? Hard for me to come up with much of a meaningful list, even if you don't try to compare their history with outliers like PARC or Bell Labs. They are clearly spending but I don't see a lot of doing. They seem to have ignored Hamming's advice.
guardiangod 4y ago
>Why? (Genuine question). Because I was there to witness the disintegration of a company and the losses it created? Instead of layoffs, you have entire departments/factory shuttering. When Nortel shut down, many engineers interviewed for BB (same province). I still remember how they looked when we told them we won't proceed with the hiring.

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago

> I hope Google is not pulling a Blackberry moment. It would be awesome, actually. Demonopolization of search space is long due. We need some breath of fresh air there.

brookst 4y ago
Google’s dominance is because of network effects; the largest search engine collects more data about what people are searching for and has the largest ad inventory, making it hard to compete with. ChatGPT has similar network effects with feedback. If Google is displaced, it will likely be in favor of another single dominant solution, not a commoditized industry with lots of players. It’s possible that niche domains like medical advice or creative writing assistance will spawn small, highly-optimized companies, but general purpose AI responders will probably coalesce into whatever the next Google is, if it’s not just Google.
- bsaul 4y ago
  With this kind of reasoning there would be no way to disrupt a first actor in a new field.
  - voakbasda 4y ago
    If their execution is good, there isn't. Fortunately, we are all human, and that's not guaranteed.
  - brookst 4y ago
    Depends on the field. Fields with strong network effects, like social media, lend themselves towards strong incumbents. But usually the market changes faster than an incumbent can, so disrupting comes from changing users needs rather than someone building a better mousetrap to serve the same needs. But lots of industries don't have particularly strong network effects. Cars are a good example; there's brand affinity, but there's no particular reason you need to drive the same brand as your neighbor. There are scale economies, so it's still not easy for new entrants.
4y ago

rchaud 4y ago

Blackberry Storm was released in November 2008, which is a year after the iPhone, not 2 years. The first Android phone came out just a month before in October. I was in NYC for job interviews then I saw billboards for both everywhere.

agloe_dreams 4y ago
Yup. What I would note is that Palm, like 7 months later, had the first real competition but Sprint just screwed them. Android took until the Droid to be competitive and the Nexus One/Galaxy S to be actually convincing as an alternative.
- indymike 4y ago
  This isn't true at all. The G1 (first widely marketed android phone) was superior in all ways but one: Marketing. The iPhone wasn't really competitive on the hardware front until the 3g which finally added GPS and a fast cellular modem.
  - acdha 4y ago
    The iPhone 3G was released before the G1, and period reviews especially noted how the G1 didn't measure up. In general, if something non-free is wildly successful the explanation is more than “marketing” and that certainly sounds like it's the case: > The HTC hardware and Android OS that powers it lack the polish and depth of even the iPhone 1.0 in most respects. > My first-generation iPhone with iPhone OS 2.1 feels faster and slicker than this late 2008 G1. > The G1 has a single-finger touchscreen that supports a few gestures, like sliding. After working with an iPhone for many months, the lack of multitouch stands out as a big loss, but those new to touchscreens are unlikely to find it a big deal. A more critical problem, however, is the lack of sensitivity in the touchscreen. > The browsing experience is frustrating and awkward, and I expected far better. With the WebKit browser core being used by both Nokia and Apple, and Google immersed in its own Chrome project, I thought the G1 might include a browser that had something unique to offer. Instead, it plays like something from about 2006. (from https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/10/android-g1-review/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/10/android-g1-review/)

908B64B197 4y ago

I remember the Storm. They released it one month or so before or after Apple released the iPhone 3G (and the App Store). I remember thinking it was a prototype when someone showed a Storm to me. Scrolling was janky, the whole phone was sluggish and slow and the keyboard barely worked. Blackberry couldn't even figure out how to get Wifi on the thing, so it was stuck using cellular while my iPhone was just streaming video. And of course, no apps. It was 2 years behind the original iPhone and shipped two years later. >Used to work for BB/RIM I wonder why RIM couldn't compete at the time. Talent gap?

guardiangod 4y ago
RIM was a hardware company, not a software company. Hence a phone is a phone, and should not be a camera (1 of the CEOs said it?) The BBOS was not designed to be a responsive, touch-screen OS. It had its root in pagers (hence the jankiness). Thru the grapevines what I heard was that the OS team said 'we can duplicate iOS' functionality with the old OS in this amount of time.' and the higher ups rolled with it. By the time Storm 2 was released, everyone realized that you can only put lip balm on a pig for so long. Hence QNX, the 'pathfinder' Playbook, and Flash as GUI API (gawd that was a rollercoaster experience. I thought it was a deathmarch and didn't think we'd actually manage to ship it.) I don't have any specific insight into the Wifi stack but most BBs up to that point have in-house designed cellular modems. As for talent wise, shrug. You can't blame people for preferring Cupertino over Waterloo-Kitchener. Although I would say that over 1/5 of the employees at RIM's campus were co-op students. I also never saw anyone do significant overtime.
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  > RIM was a hardware company, not a software company. Hence a phone is a phone, and should not be a camera (1 of the CEOs said it?) So was Apple. Other than their brief attempt at licensing MacOS, they were and still are a hardware company at heart. > I don't have any specific insight into the Wifi stack but most BBs up to that point have in-house designed cellular modems. They were maintaining their own modem implementations? That's quite a feat. > As for talent wise, shrug. You can't blame people for preferring Cupertino over Waterloo-Kitchener. Although I would say that over 1/5 of the employees at RIM's campus were co-op students. Was compensation even remotely comparable? Having 20% of the company be interns is... rather unusual.

EarlKing 4y ago

It's worse than that: This is Google pulling a Yahoo moment. They're realizing they missed the boat and are scrambling to try to maintain relevance against what is clearly an existential threat to their revenue.

treeman79 4y ago

Decades ago intel put out a press about the amazing new tech their CPUs would have. 3 of 5 CPU manufactures gave up. By the time the tech actually arrived, AMD had it as well. The others would have been fine. Sometimes a press release can make all the difference. (Sorry can’t find story that old)

algorias 4y ago
Agreed. There's a lot of hype around LLMs right now, but they have not proven their value yet.
- immibis 4y ago
  I think they have proven their value for creating spam and propaganda. There's a lot of money in convincing people the system isn't broken and they just need to work harder. The people who receive the profits those workers make can pay a lot for the propaganda that keeps them working.
crote 4y ago
There was NexGen around 1990, which was bought by AMD and ended up providing the base for AMD's further products. Transmeta released two x86 CPUs a bit after 2000, which ended up being technological failures. Cyrix released some budget CPUs in the 1990s but had legal issues and ran into financial trouble, eventually ending up as part of VIA. Centaur Technology developed some CPUs in the 2000s, and eventually became VIA's x86 division. They released efficient low-cost processors, which were reasonably successful on the embedded market. VIA is still around, but doesn't bring out a lot of new products. I think most of them were killed mostly by the dotcom bubble, and CPUs getting increasingly complex. The market just shifted beneath them. It is rarely a matter of just giving up.
gmokki 4y ago
It was announcement Intels first 64 bit processor Itanium. It was going to destroy all the existing 64 bit processors: alpha, sparc etc that had the market cornered (and even MS Windows was ported to most them). In the end Itanium was late and bad project but competition had already folded. Except for amd that had no existing 64 bit cpu and created AMD64 extension to x86. Intel grudlingly got on board but called their clone of AMD64 "IA-32e" architecure in thei marketikg material. The name was later changed to x86-64, only after what I assume when Itanium was internally acknowledged as failure.