8 ms·

'BlackBerry' review: The comedy and tragedy of the innovator's dilemma

130 points by cf100clunk 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pcurve 3y ago
That's one of the more enjoyable trailers I've seen.
Lorin 3y ago
Meanwhile all the patents were sold to a nameless holding company so we'll never see a reasonable mobile keyboard attachment for phones until they expire.
no_wizard 3y ago
RIM could have had a second act, potentially, by being SMS 2.0 (as mentioned in this article[0] they tried to sell BBM to carriers as SMS 2.0), and I'm not sure how they lost out on this, as Google did this with RCS many years later. I think if they had done it, it would have forced better interop with Apple (iMessage was still newish and they may have been in a situation to be further pressured longer to support standard communication protocols). There was a longform article about RIM's attempt to become the "BBM" company but I can't for the life of me find it, it was by a major tech publication (The Verge I think, but I tried searching their archives and no dice) [0]: https://www.inverse.com/tech/how-blackberry-bbm-changed-messaging-forever https://www.inverse.com/tech/how-blackberry-bbm-changed-mess...
- kiratp 3y ago
  I was at Windows Phone (WP7/8 days) when “RCS was just a couple of years away”. Good thing I didn’t hold my breath - it didn’t seem to me then that there was any path to success and I was on my first job as a 20 year old. Google hasn’t managed anything with RCS other than deploy it for their own messaging app that talks to their own infrastructure. The fact that the app uses RCS is an implementation detail - could just as well be carrier pigeons. Doesn’t matter because it isn’t cross-carrier interoperable. The carriers all moved from Circuit Switched SMS signaling to SMS over IMS (LTE onwards) for interoperable SMS. IMS is the layer under RCS (created originally for cable set top boxes - go figure). This is basically SMS over IP which means your device is doing all the legacy stuff like 7bit ASCII encoding to pack messages into 160 characters etc. These requirements won’t go away because, the moment a carrier tries to do cross-carrier interop there is a whole sea of legacy translations that would have to be managed by the message originating carrier. This would require real-time figuring out the capabilities of a receiving carrier based on phone number homing. It’s a massive undertaking that’s $$$. On top of this The carriers all fought including E2EE in the spec to avoid picking a fight with the government. So anything Google implemented is DOA. RCS has failed.
- initplus 3y ago
  The reason iMessage has been successful (and RCS has not) is because iMessage doesn't have any reliance on the carrier. Selling a messaging system to carriers doesn't make any sense, why cooperate with them when it's easier to route around them and handle all the messages through your own infra.
- msh 3y ago
  I dont think that they had the reach to be SMS 2.0, Blackberry was only a major player in a few markets outside north america.
- muppetman 3y ago
  Is this the article? https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-inside-story-of-why-blackberry-is-failing/article14563602/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-insid...
netaustin 3y ago
I have a lot of Blackberry nostalgia; I was 23 in NYC, 2007ish, and my work-issued BB Curve (later a Bold) plus my personal original iPhone were a combination that I was so happy with. The Blackberry could tether to my early MacBook pro in the remotest of locations, and I could easily SSH into the (real) servers I ran. Never used BBM but played Bricks for hours and hours. I wasn’t nearly as satisfied with an iPhone-only solution until 2017 or so.
pavlov 3y ago
For a fun dramatized look at mobile innovation a decade earlier, I can recommend the recent mini-series “Mobile 101” (also known as “Made in Finland”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_101 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_101 It follows a group of Nokia engineers and managers through 1988-90 as the company tries to shed its conglomerate roots, is sued by Motorola for patent infringement, and one engineer secretly keeps alive his pet project to develop the world’s smallest mobile phone (an unimaginably light 275 g!) I particularly enjoyed the contrast when the slick American lawyers from Motorola come to take depositions from Nokia engineers in the small depressing Finnish town where Nokia used to have its phone manufacturing operations.
v-erne 3y ago
BlackBerry - that brings back some memories. 8700 was my first real smartphone - I got it on one of my first work projects because I was tasked to create mobile client for some CRM. I distinctly remeber that the UI API was quite complicated and took me weeks to get satisfactory results. And the IDE and simulator from RIM were so annoyingly slow that I was very close to never touching Java again. But, I must admit that the hardware itself was quite impressive and nice to use. And it somehow allowed me to have unlimited mobile internet access 15 years before it become norm here in Poland (well almost - there are still transfer limits).
Patrickmi 3y ago
[dead]
sourcecodeplz 3y ago
That keyboard was amazing. Such a joy and very satisfying to use.
theflyingpigeon 3y ago
I miss my BlackBerry. I had a Pearl Flip, it was the most beautiful thing ever. All these boring phones, especially the iPhone, don’t come even close. Edit: added “flip”. The touch keyboard is a disgrace.
dp-hackernews 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20230519223542/https://www.engadget.com/blackberry-movie-review-comedy-tragedy-innovators-dilemma-140115574.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230519223542/https://www.engad...
duxup 3y ago
Is this just a sorta-movie review / recap that kinda pretends to be about the book The Innovator's Dilemma?
- dmix 3y ago
  Maybe he just read the book for the first time recently? I have a habit of reading some books, getting really into them, and then relating everything I see to it.
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    Sounds like a good book to me. Got any recent recs?
    - dmix 3y ago
      Sorry no. I stopped reading business books after too many were a waste of time.
- steveylang 3y ago
  It's a real movie review (though pretty short): > BlackBerry has everything Apple's Tetris film lacked: human drama grounded in actual history, without the need to spice things up with car chases and fantastical storytelling. On the face of it, the rise and fall of Research in Motion's keyboard-equipped smartphone may not seem inherently compelling. But the brilliance of the film — directed by Matt Johnson, who also co-wrote it with Matthew Miller — is that it makes the BlackBerry's journey feel like a genuine tragedy.
skyyler 3y ago
I'm excited to have some time to watch this. Johnson's previous work The Dirties was surprisingly great. Hugely recommended to anyone that enjoys metafiction.
- initplus 3y ago
  The tv series he go-directed “Nirvana the Band the Show” was also quite funny.
  - zooch 3y ago
    Came here to mention Nirvana the Band the Show. One of my absolute favourites and I recommend it to everyone. Blackberry was good as well - don't expect the exact facts, it says right in the beginning it is a fictionalization.
- mjmsmith 3y ago
  Operation Avalanche too. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-operation-avalanche-matt-johnson-feature-20160909-snap-story.html https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-operat...
silisili 3y ago
> And it arrived just as 3G networks were rolling out, which gave carriers more of an incentive to charge customers for data instead of cellular minutes. Rather sloppy rewriting of history or connecting of dots, as the original iPhone notoriously did not support 3G.
- orf 3y ago
  They didn’t say it did?
  - silisili 3y ago
    It's a weird connection to make. 3G is rolling out for much faster data, so carriers can start charging data. This makes it sound like a marketing play by carriers to push it. But why would they push a device using the much slower EDGE? There were plenty of 3G phones out at the time if that were the angle.
    - Spooky23 3y ago
      Because AT&T / Cingular didn’t have a good 3G story. The iPhone was the right device at the right time with the right launch partner. Its success allowed them to cow Verizon, whose bureaucracy and contract management is government like. People bought the iPhone in spite of EDGE. EDGE was fine for text devices like the Blackberry or T-Mobile Sidekick. iPhone tipped things over in lots of ways.
      - Apocryphon 3y ago
        Huh. Did the success of the iPhone lead to the T-1000 esque re-formation of the AT&T monopoly?
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        No, that had already happened. See the graph and dates here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System ATT had acquired Cingular by 2005.
robertlagrant 3y ago
My mind was blown when Blackberry allowed WhatsApp on their devices. BBM was so sticky to so many people that if they hadn't had WhatsApp to transition to other devices to, I think Blackberry would still be alive and kicking today.
- mdon 3y ago
  WhatsApp blackberry developer here (2010-eol). We were pretty sure they wouldn’t let us into their store if we had started later, but they left us in since we were already there starting in 2009. We did start to hit push service quotas. They quota by the app, not per user with the app. So we had a quota of 5 million pushes per day. Asked for more. Denied. We found some creative alternatives. PIN messaging was a surprisingly open API. So we ended up having currently connected devices send a PIN message to devices we want to bring online. The recipient device would delete the message to cut down on noise.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  RIM was already completely fucked before WhatsApp was even invented. I went to a BlackBerry developer conference in San Jose a year after the iPhone was released and it was like a lynch mob. They were pissed that Apple's APIs were so good. Nobody wanted to develop apps for BlackBerry and these were the attendees at the BlackBerry developer conference!
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Maybe, but just watching how people were totally locked into BBM as how they conducted their lives... it was huge.
  - nvy 3y ago
    Yes, I naively wrote RIM an email about the ease of onboarding developers on Android and iOS, compared to the hurdles that needed hurdling on Blackberry OS, even before "BB10". Somebody senior in Engineering actually responded, to their credit, but the response was basically "because security, which is why we're the #1 platform". Aged like milk.
MrOwnPut 3y ago
Contrary to the tone of the article, this is an obligatory reminder that the BlackBerry movie is heavily fictionalized: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/dennis-kavelman-i-was-a-longtime-senior-leader-at-blackberry-the-new-movie-is-not-our-story https://nationalpost.com/opinion/dennis-kavelman-i-was-a-lon...
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  Hopefully it will give Glenn Howerton (Dennis from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) the Oscar mod.
- calyth2018 3y ago
  Engadget had been quite biased against BlackBerry for a long long time. "Crucially, though, it's not just like reading a Wikipedia entry. Johnson tells us exactly who Laziridis and Balsillie are from the very first scenes of the movie." This statement's patently false. Aside from failing to spell the name of one of the main characters correctly, anyone who have interacted with the real Mike Lazaridis knows that he's not a meek push-over of a computer nerd. All the review, this one included, that raves about how true and accurate the movie have never been there. And the movie would have been better off if they just used false names, because at least it would be a lot less distracting from all the wild deviations from reality.
- sbarre 3y ago
  Yeah I know a few people who worked at RIM back in the day, and they're all pretty much in full agreement with this op ed.
- babyshake 3y ago
  So is The Social Network, but I still think despite that it gets at some important truths about tech culture.
  - MrOwnPut 3y ago
    Such as?
- 3y ago
throw0101b 3y ago
The movie is based on the book Losing the Signal by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, which is probably closer to the actual history: * https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25602451 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25602451 Recent interview with Silcoff on the topic: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TkQCMHb3Qo&t=49m56s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TkQCMHb3Qo&t=49m56s
- anyfactor 3y ago
  I just finished watching Matthias Wandel's take on the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_w7T3JMXk4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_w7T3JMXk4 He was featured quite prominently in the book, and he even consulted on the movie. Can't wait to see his movie review video.
- rchaud 3y ago
  The original book is fantastic, the HN crowd would enjoy the details provided. It's a very engaging read, on par with books like Masters of Doom.
arecurrence 3y ago
This movie is scoring well with 98% on rotten tomatoes and 7.9 on imdb. I loved it and while it's almost entirely a fictional work (in particular, none of the characters are even remotely similar to the people that led RIM)... it really hits on the feeling of a fast scaling startup challenging incumbents with innovative hardware. 1. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blackberry https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blackberry 2. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21867434/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21867434/
- ge96 3y ago
  I like these shows/movies that chase something like: - Jobs (2013) - social network - halt and catch fire - silicon valley - the internship - Tetris there's more can't think of right now I'm looking forward to seeing this when it streams
  - mhh__ 3y ago
    Margin Call?
    - ge96 3y ago
      Yeah those are fun too eg. Wolf of Wallstreet, Big Short But I was more looking at the tech ones eg. hardware/software I know HFT, I don't mean that I'd throw The Aviator in there but again not tech, but that idea swimming in money, possibility, changing the future. One day a movie about EM ha. Anyway I wish I had my thing I was chasing/something novel. Maybe one day. The Circle is another that doesn't belong here but has that "cool tech company" vibe.
      - nerfbatplz 3y ago
        Micheal Lewis’ best book Flashboys is about the birth of HFT but it’s been in development hell for years. According to Lewis Hollywood wouldn’t green light it because the main character is an Asian man.
  - foobarbecue 3y ago
somat 3y ago
I had a blackberry passport. I bought it when I heard that blackberry was getting out of the phone OS business, So a terrible reason to buy one, but I have always been a fan of QNX and after this I would never get a chance to see what a qnx phone could be. My thoughts. That keyboard, oh man that keyboard was very very good, I am on a full touchscreen phone currently and I curse that stupid virtual keyboard every time I have to use it. with a double curse if I have to use it while in a car. There was not much left of qnx for the user to interact with, sort of like whatever is left of linux in android phones, kind of a hollow shell. however I did like the UI. it is hard to quantify but it felt better designed to be used, a tool. Android by comparison feels more like it was designed to look pretty with usability as a second class citizen. but really it is a minor thing. I suspect the real advantage of having qnx as a real time os was how responsive it was, not fast, but always responsive, never any lag. but that may just be my imagination. Edit: I just remembered the square screen, I love the square screen, and it took square pictures, what a great phone.
- CosmicShadow 3y ago
  It was and still is the coolest device, holding it sideways and scrolling with your thumb, it was so light and perfectly sized, the battery lasted for DAYS. I really want another phone like it, but everything now is the same, except for the foldables, which intrigue me just because I want something different and new. It's too bad the bigger ones are so expensive.
- ano88888 3y ago
  most people spent the majority of their time viewing the content not typing so that's why our screens get bigger and bigger.
  - 6510 3y ago
    This is the design goal, it's working great for the status quo, everything you say is hard then burned eventually.
- fzeindl 3y ago
  > Android by comparison feels more like it was designed to look pretty with usability as a second class citizen. I do think that this comes from the code base not being very good. The base layout and view classes have hundreds of thousand lines of codes, the layout algorithm is quadratic to the number of views. It was originally designed for digital cameras, not for phones. The base classes use many bit fields as well instead of enums, they don't look like Java. Plus the strange back button concept which comes from the camera. All this means developers waste a lot of time wrestling the framework.
pavelstoev 3y ago
I worked at RIM/BlackBerry in 2005-06. It was my first engineering job. I was in my early 20’s and at some point, way before iPhone, I went to my manager and suggested we should add a camera and some multimedia features to the device, because that’s what the younger people wanted and used. He said - but why, BlackBerry is all about serving the business people market. We argued. Turns out we were both right and wrong…
- anyfactor 3y ago
  Did you know Matthias Wandel[0]? I used to watch his YouTube videos all the time. And he used to talk about his days in RIM as he was one of the first engineer there. You reminded me to check his channel again and looks like he did a reaction video to the trailer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_w7T3JMXk4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_w7T3JMXk4 [0] https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel
  - pavelstoev 3y ago
    Unfortunately I did not know him but I will surely follow now :)
- osigurdson 3y ago
  The ABC’s of business declined: arrogance, bureaucracy and complacency. It sounds like at least one of those were at play at RIM
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Similar experience on the internal shows at Nokia, when several of us tried to suggest Maemo should have a radio antenna instead of just wlan.
  - senko 3y ago
    Rumor I heard at the time was Symbian "owned" GSM and was golden goose and wasn't about to let another project encroach on it. Ie political, not technical or even strategic, decision.
WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
They should have tried the laptop market as well, I loved their phones.. There are rumors about Elon Musk's team wanting to buy RIM to revive the BlackBerry legacy (with the current weather of the geopolitics, it's IMO very well positioned for a comeback), leveraging Starlink would be interesting to see.. Who remember when last year he mentioned he'd make his own phone to go after Apple (appstore drama)? ;) Apple has no competition, Microsoft tried and flopped, BlackBerry is imo the only one able to compete

130 points by cf100clunk 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pcurve 3y ago

That's one of the more enjoyable trailers I've seen.

Lorin 3y ago

Meanwhile all the patents were sold to a nameless holding company so we'll never see a reasonable mobile keyboard attachment for phones until they expire.

no_wizard 3y ago

RIM could have had a second act, potentially, by being SMS 2.0 (as mentioned in this article[0] they tried to sell BBM to carriers as SMS 2.0), and I'm not sure how they lost out on this, as Google did this with RCS many years later. I think if they had done it, it would have forced better interop with Apple (iMessage was still newish and they may have been in a situation to be further pressured longer to support standard communication protocols). There was a longform article about RIM's attempt to become the "BBM" company but I can't for the life of me find it, it was by a major tech publication (The Verge I think, but I tried searching their archives and no dice) [0]: https://www.inverse.com/tech/how-blackberry-bbm-changed-messaging-forever https://www.inverse.com/tech/how-blackberry-bbm-changed-mess...

kiratp 3y ago
I was at Windows Phone (WP7/8 days) when “RCS was just a couple of years away”. Good thing I didn’t hold my breath - it didn’t seem to me then that there was any path to success and I was on my first job as a 20 year old. Google hasn’t managed anything with RCS other than deploy it for their own messaging app that talks to their own infrastructure. The fact that the app uses RCS is an implementation detail - could just as well be carrier pigeons. Doesn’t matter because it isn’t cross-carrier interoperable. The carriers all moved from Circuit Switched SMS signaling to SMS over IMS (LTE onwards) for interoperable SMS. IMS is the layer under RCS (created originally for cable set top boxes - go figure). This is basically SMS over IP which means your device is doing all the legacy stuff like 7bit ASCII encoding to pack messages into 160 characters etc. These requirements won’t go away because, the moment a carrier tries to do cross-carrier interop there is a whole sea of legacy translations that would have to be managed by the message originating carrier. This would require real-time figuring out the capabilities of a receiving carrier based on phone number homing. It’s a massive undertaking that’s $$$. On top of this The carriers all fought including E2EE in the spec to avoid picking a fight with the government. So anything Google implemented is DOA. RCS has failed.
initplus 3y ago
The reason iMessage has been successful (and RCS has not) is because iMessage doesn't have any reliance on the carrier. Selling a messaging system to carriers doesn't make any sense, why cooperate with them when it's easier to route around them and handle all the messages through your own infra.
msh 3y ago
I dont think that they had the reach to be SMS 2.0, Blackberry was only a major player in a few markets outside north america.
muppetman 3y ago
Is this the article? https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-inside-story-of-why-blackberry-is-failing/article14563602/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-insid...

netaustin 3y ago

I have a lot of Blackberry nostalgia; I was 23 in NYC, 2007ish, and my work-issued BB Curve (later a Bold) plus my personal original iPhone were a combination that I was so happy with. The Blackberry could tether to my early MacBook pro in the remotest of locations, and I could easily SSH into the (real) servers I ran. Never used BBM but played Bricks for hours and hours. I wasn’t nearly as satisfied with an iPhone-only solution until 2017 or so.

pavlov 3y ago

For a fun dramatized look at mobile innovation a decade earlier, I can recommend the recent mini-series “Mobile 101” (also known as “Made in Finland”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_101 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_101 It follows a group of Nokia engineers and managers through 1988-90 as the company tries to shed its conglomerate roots, is sued by Motorola for patent infringement, and one engineer secretly keeps alive his pet project to develop the world’s smallest mobile phone (an unimaginably light 275 g!) I particularly enjoyed the contrast when the slick American lawyers from Motorola come to take depositions from Nokia engineers in the small depressing Finnish town where Nokia used to have its phone manufacturing operations.

v-erne 3y ago

BlackBerry - that brings back some memories. 8700 was my first real smartphone - I got it on one of my first work projects because I was tasked to create mobile client for some CRM. I distinctly remeber that the UI API was quite complicated and took me weeks to get satisfactory results. And the IDE and simulator from RIM were so annoyingly slow that I was very close to never touching Java again. But, I must admit that the hardware itself was quite impressive and nice to use. And it somehow allowed me to have unlimited mobile internet access 15 years before it become norm here in Poland (well almost - there are still transfer limits).

Patrickmi 3y ago

[dead]

sourcecodeplz 3y ago

That keyboard was amazing. Such a joy and very satisfying to use.

theflyingpigeon 3y ago

I miss my BlackBerry. I had a Pearl Flip, it was the most beautiful thing ever. All these boring phones, especially the iPhone, don’t come even close. Edit: added “flip”. The touch keyboard is a disgrace.

dp-hackernews 3y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230519223542/https://www.engadget.com/blackberry-movie-review-comedy-tragedy-innovators-dilemma-140115574.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230519223542/https://www.engad...

duxup 3y ago

Is this just a sorta-movie review / recap that kinda pretends to be about the book The Innovator's Dilemma?

dmix 3y ago
Maybe he just read the book for the first time recently? I have a habit of reading some books, getting really into them, and then relating everything I see to it.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  Sounds like a good book to me. Got any recent recs?
  - dmix 3y ago
    Sorry no. I stopped reading business books after too many were a waste of time.
steveylang 3y ago
It's a real movie review (though pretty short): > BlackBerry has everything Apple's Tetris film lacked: human drama grounded in actual history, without the need to spice things up with car chases and fantastical storytelling. On the face of it, the rise and fall of Research in Motion's keyboard-equipped smartphone may not seem inherently compelling. But the brilliance of the film — directed by Matt Johnson, who also co-wrote it with Matthew Miller — is that it makes the BlackBerry's journey feel like a genuine tragedy.

skyyler 3y ago

I'm excited to have some time to watch this. Johnson's previous work The Dirties was surprisingly great. Hugely recommended to anyone that enjoys metafiction.

initplus 3y ago
The tv series he go-directed “Nirvana the Band the Show” was also quite funny.
- zooch 3y ago
  Came here to mention Nirvana the Band the Show. One of my absolute favourites and I recommend it to everyone. Blackberry was good as well - don't expect the exact facts, it says right in the beginning it is a fictionalization.
mjmsmith 3y ago
Operation Avalanche too. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-operation-avalanche-matt-johnson-feature-20160909-snap-story.html https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-operat...

silisili 3y ago

> And it arrived just as 3G networks were rolling out, which gave carriers more of an incentive to charge customers for data instead of cellular minutes. Rather sloppy rewriting of history or connecting of dots, as the original iPhone notoriously did not support 3G.

orf 3y ago
They didn’t say it did?
- silisili 3y ago
  It's a weird connection to make. 3G is rolling out for much faster data, so carriers can start charging data. This makes it sound like a marketing play by carriers to push it. But why would they push a device using the much slower EDGE? There were plenty of 3G phones out at the time if that were the angle.
  - Spooky23 3y ago
    Because AT&T / Cingular didn’t have a good 3G story. The iPhone was the right device at the right time with the right launch partner. Its success allowed them to cow Verizon, whose bureaucracy and contract management is government like. People bought the iPhone in spite of EDGE. EDGE was fine for text devices like the Blackberry or T-Mobile Sidekick. iPhone tipped things over in lots of ways.
    - Apocryphon 3y ago
      Huh. Did the success of the iPhone lead to the T-1000 esque re-formation of the AT&T monopoly?
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        No, that had already happened. See the graph and dates here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System ATT had acquired Cingular by 2005.

robertlagrant 3y ago

My mind was blown when Blackberry allowed WhatsApp on their devices. BBM was so sticky to so many people that if they hadn't had WhatsApp to transition to other devices to, I think Blackberry would still be alive and kicking today.

mdon 3y ago
WhatsApp blackberry developer here (2010-eol). We were pretty sure they wouldn’t let us into their store if we had started later, but they left us in since we were already there starting in 2009. We did start to hit push service quotas. They quota by the app, not per user with the app. So we had a quota of 5 million pushes per day. Asked for more. Denied. We found some creative alternatives. PIN messaging was a surprisingly open API. So we ended up having currently connected devices send a PIN message to devices we want to bring online. The recipient device would delete the message to cut down on noise.
jeffbee 3y ago
RIM was already completely fucked before WhatsApp was even invented. I went to a BlackBerry developer conference in San Jose a year after the iPhone was released and it was like a lynch mob. They were pissed that Apple's APIs were so good. Nobody wanted to develop apps for BlackBerry and these were the attendees at the BlackBerry developer conference!
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Maybe, but just watching how people were totally locked into BBM as how they conducted their lives... it was huge.
- nvy 3y ago
  Yes, I naively wrote RIM an email about the ease of onboarding developers on Android and iOS, compared to the hurdles that needed hurdling on Blackberry OS, even before "BB10". Somebody senior in Engineering actually responded, to their credit, but the response was basically "because security, which is why we're the #1 platform". Aged like milk.

MrOwnPut 3y ago

Contrary to the tone of the article, this is an obligatory reminder that the BlackBerry movie is heavily fictionalized: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/dennis-kavelman-i-was-a-longtime-senior-leader-at-blackberry-the-new-movie-is-not-our-story https://nationalpost.com/opinion/dennis-kavelman-i-was-a-lon...

Apocryphon 3y ago
Hopefully it will give Glenn Howerton (Dennis from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) the Oscar mod.
calyth2018 3y ago
Engadget had been quite biased against BlackBerry for a long long time. "Crucially, though, it's not just like reading a Wikipedia entry. Johnson tells us exactly who Laziridis and Balsillie are from the very first scenes of the movie." This statement's patently false. Aside from failing to spell the name of one of the main characters correctly, anyone who have interacted with the real Mike Lazaridis knows that he's not a meek push-over of a computer nerd. All the review, this one included, that raves about how true and accurate the movie have never been there. And the movie would have been better off if they just used false names, because at least it would be a lot less distracting from all the wild deviations from reality.
sbarre 3y ago
Yeah I know a few people who worked at RIM back in the day, and they're all pretty much in full agreement with this op ed.
babyshake 3y ago
So is The Social Network, but I still think despite that it gets at some important truths about tech culture.
- MrOwnPut 3y ago
  Such as?
3y ago

throw0101b 3y ago

The movie is based on the book Losing the Signal by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, which is probably closer to the actual history: * https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25602451 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25602451 Recent interview with Silcoff on the topic: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TkQCMHb3Qo&t=49m56s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TkQCMHb3Qo&t=49m56s

anyfactor 3y ago
I just finished watching Matthias Wandel's take on the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_w7T3JMXk4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_w7T3JMXk4 He was featured quite prominently in the book, and he even consulted on the movie. Can't wait to see his movie review video.
rchaud 3y ago
The original book is fantastic, the HN crowd would enjoy the details provided. It's a very engaging read, on par with books like Masters of Doom.

arecurrence 3y ago

This movie is scoring well with 98% on rotten tomatoes and 7.9 on imdb. I loved it and while it's almost entirely a fictional work (in particular, none of the characters are even remotely similar to the people that led RIM)... it really hits on the feeling of a fast scaling startup challenging incumbents with innovative hardware. 1. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blackberry https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blackberry 2. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21867434/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21867434/

ge96 3y ago
I like these shows/movies that chase something like: - Jobs (2013) - social network - halt and catch fire - silicon valley - the internship - Tetris there's more can't think of right now I'm looking forward to seeing this when it streams
- mhh__ 3y ago
  Margin Call?
  - ge96 3y ago
    Yeah those are fun too eg. Wolf of Wallstreet, Big Short But I was more looking at the tech ones eg. hardware/software I know HFT, I don't mean that I'd throw The Aviator in there but again not tech, but that idea swimming in money, possibility, changing the future. One day a movie about EM ha. Anyway I wish I had my thing I was chasing/something novel. Maybe one day. The Circle is another that doesn't belong here but has that "cool tech company" vibe.
    - nerfbatplz 3y ago
      Micheal Lewis’ best book Flashboys is about the birth of HFT but it’s been in development hell for years. According to Lewis Hollywood wouldn’t green light it because the main character is an Asian man.
- foobarbecue 3y ago

somat 3y ago

I had a blackberry passport. I bought it when I heard that blackberry was getting out of the phone OS business, So a terrible reason to buy one, but I have always been a fan of QNX and after this I would never get a chance to see what a qnx phone could be. My thoughts. That keyboard, oh man that keyboard was very very good, I am on a full touchscreen phone currently and I curse that stupid virtual keyboard every time I have to use it. with a double curse if I have to use it while in a car. There was not much left of qnx for the user to interact with, sort of like whatever is left of linux in android phones, kind of a hollow shell. however I did like the UI. it is hard to quantify but it felt better designed to be used, a tool. Android by comparison feels more like it was designed to look pretty with usability as a second class citizen. but really it is a minor thing. I suspect the real advantage of having qnx as a real time os was how responsive it was, not fast, but always responsive, never any lag. but that may just be my imagination. Edit: I just remembered the square screen, I love the square screen, and it took square pictures, what a great phone.

CosmicShadow 3y ago
It was and still is the coolest device, holding it sideways and scrolling with your thumb, it was so light and perfectly sized, the battery lasted for DAYS. I really want another phone like it, but everything now is the same, except for the foldables, which intrigue me just because I want something different and new. It's too bad the bigger ones are so expensive.
ano88888 3y ago
most people spent the majority of their time viewing the content not typing so that's why our screens get bigger and bigger.
- 6510 3y ago
  This is the design goal, it's working great for the status quo, everything you say is hard then burned eventually.
fzeindl 3y ago
> Android by comparison feels more like it was designed to look pretty with usability as a second class citizen. I do think that this comes from the code base not being very good. The base layout and view classes have hundreds of thousand lines of codes, the layout algorithm is quadratic to the number of views. It was originally designed for digital cameras, not for phones. The base classes use many bit fields as well instead of enums, they don't look like Java. Plus the strange back button concept which comes from the camera. All this means developers waste a lot of time wrestling the framework.

pavelstoev 3y ago

I worked at RIM/BlackBerry in 2005-06. It was my first engineering job. I was in my early 20’s and at some point, way before iPhone, I went to my manager and suggested we should add a camera and some multimedia features to the device, because that’s what the younger people wanted and used. He said - but why, BlackBerry is all about serving the business people market. We argued. Turns out we were both right and wrong…

anyfactor 3y ago
Did you know Matthias Wandel[0]? I used to watch his YouTube videos all the time. And he used to talk about his days in RIM as he was one of the first engineer there. You reminded me to check his channel again and looks like he did a reaction video to the trailer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_w7T3JMXk4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_w7T3JMXk4 [0] https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel
- pavelstoev 3y ago
  Unfortunately I did not know him but I will surely follow now :)
osigurdson 3y ago
The ABC’s of business declined: arrogance, bureaucracy and complacency. It sounds like at least one of those were at play at RIM
pjmlp 3y ago
Similar experience on the internal shows at Nokia, when several of us tried to suggest Maemo should have a radio antenna instead of just wlan.
- senko 3y ago
  Rumor I heard at the time was Symbian "owned" GSM and was golden goose and wasn't about to let another project encroach on it. Ie political, not technical or even strategic, decision.

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

They should have tried the laptop market as well, I loved their phones.. There are rumors about Elon Musk's team wanting to buy RIM to revive the BlackBerry legacy (with the current weather of the geopolitics, it's IMO very well positioned for a comeback), leveraging Starlink would be interesting to see.. Who remember when last year he mentioned he'd make his own phone to go after Apple (appstore drama)? ;) Apple has no competition, Microsoft tried and flopped, BlackBerry is imo the only one able to compete