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BlackBerry really illustrates the problems that come with something truly new enters a market. You often only se two choices: - Don't imitate them and steadily

by _ea1k 3y ago

BlackBerry really illustrates the problems that come with something truly new enters a market. You often only se two choices: - Don't imitate them and steadily cede market share - Imitate them and immediately alienate your user base I often wonder what they really should have done?

Mountain_Skies 3y ago
They made some pretty bad decisions during their decline. As a developer, it became infuriating how often the signing server was down. You can't push unsigned code to a Blackberry hardware device and the software simulator was not very good at replicating the actual behavior of code on the actual hardware. It was often broken at random for a couple of days but that stretched over a week sometimes. Even correcting a small typo like 'SEX Compliance' that should have been 'SEC Compliance' could take a week because the size of a change didn't matter, everything sent to the device had to be signed by RIM's signing server. This was at a time they were pleading for developers to not abandon the platform for Apple and Android, both of which had much simpler development on testing cycles for their hardware, even if publishing to the actual store could be a chore.
ttul 3y ago
BlackBerry didn’t have a second act. They put all their blackberries in one very nice basket and failed to invest their riches into the kind of deep, speculative R&D that keeps Apple, Microsoft, and Google on the cutting edge on multiple fronts simultaneously, ready to pivot when the opportunity or threat presents itself. Is it a tragedy, though? I think most companies are doing well if they manage to return billions to their initial shareholders by exploiting a breakthrough product for a few years. Companies aren’t meant to last forever. They exist to enrich shareholders for a while - hopefully a long time, but everyone realizes most companies eventually are bought or fail due to changing market conditions.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  They almost did with BBM. They came really close to getting major telecoms to use it as their backbone to replace SMS / MMS infrastructure. A bit of a shame that never came to fruition honestly
  - ttul 3y ago
    I attended the Mobile World Congress in 2012 and what stuck out for me was the total absence of Apple. BlackBerry was there and Google had a massive booth. The telecoms were all promoting their versions of over-the-top messaging, meant to compete with Apple and sustain the declining SMS subscription revenue. I could appreciate the need for the incumbents to come up with _something_ to counteract the iPhone wave, but it all seemed rather hopeless at the time.
    - no_wizard 3y ago
      Telecoms shot themselves in the foot by not going full swing on something with great interop and iMessage features. They should have totally dominated video / multi-media messaging etc. But they all wanted their own proprietary thing, even today. Blackberry came really close to getting major telecoms onboard for adopting BBM as their over the top replacement, but it never closed (iirc they argued about price). I feel that if telecoms realized what they are, which is infrastructure dumb pipes, things like interoperable standards would be easier for them to adopt. Look at the failure of Verizon trying to diversify, they just shut down BlueJeans (a zoom competitor) and haven't really done much with Yahoo since acquisition.
      - ttul 3y ago
        Telecoms by the mid-2000s had long ago lost their innovation mojo, ceding it to the big tech companies after the deregulation push of the late-1990s and over-leveraging to build out internet networks.
maxsilver 3y ago
> I often wonder what they really should have done? They could have pivoted to Android earlier. I had a BlackBerry Q10 and their BB10(QNX) was actually pretty good (the unified messaging was amazing at the time), but it was clear even then that without proper Android app/ecosystem support, it was always doomed to struggle. (their clever emulator was great, but wasn't enough). - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXewkl5K7-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXewkl5K7-M When they finally did pivot to Android, their phones were pretty good (I carried the "BB Priv" for a long time, and the KeyOne was great from my short time with it). But they were way too late by then, and had to face the onslaught of Samsung / LG competition, who all had newer tech at cheaper pricing. A BlackBerry Priv in 2011 might have saved the company, it would be competing against a "Droid Razr" and an iPhone 4S. The Priv actually arrived in 2015, and was competing against a Galaxy S6 Edge and iPhone 6S Plus. It was way too late -- people who loved their keyboards had already learned to survive with "phablet"-sized smartphones for a few years by then.
- _ea1k 3y ago
  > They could have pivoted to Android earlier. I thought about that. They could have been really competitive with some of the early Droid phones, which were really what brought Android to a lot of people in the early days. But I also remember that a lot of those companies really struggled to reach profitability with their Android phone lines. It was a hypercompetitive space with really low margins. Maybe it would have worked if combined with their security reputation and with BBM.
- deltarholamda 3y ago
  I found the Android Blackberries terrible. Some good parts, but I am really not a fan of how Android does things. (I use iOS, but under a "best of the worst" protest.) The BB OS was great, if a bit slow. The worst part of it was the terrible browser, which really didn't do it any favors, but the communications part of it was so good I could work around it. I don't care much for any mobile browsers, everything is better on a real computer, but at least Safari doesn't crawl to a stop. I had high hopes for the QNX phones, but RIM sure didn't. But you're right, by the time they had pivoted to Android so they could take advantage of the "App market," it was too late. Having had a BB for so many years, pawing at a screen makes me feel like the monkeys at the Monolith. I used the BB as my primary email tool, it was just that good at what it did.
numpad0 3y ago
They could simply launched and maintained Android and BBOS lines, both initially with keyboards and later touch, until both OS options could be converged(and keyboard removed if needed). The question should be, why the RIM/BB as a company couldn't tread the obvious path forward, and QWOP'd on spot?
phonon 3y ago
Focused on BlackBerry Messenger (put it on Android and iOS app stores). WhatsApp sold for $19.3 Billion. BBM could have been bigger.
- xethos 3y ago
  One of the founders / Co-CEOs wanted to do just this. He was over-ruled, and sometimes I wonder which one is more bitter about (effectively) losing their company - Jim (IIRC), who played Cassandra and was ignored, or Mike, who didn't trust him enough.
  - phonon 3y ago
    Led to him quitting, yup. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/balsillie-quit-blackberry-over-nixed-bbm-plan-report-1.1872572 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/balsillie-... 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...
- _ea1k 3y ago
  That is a really good point. They'd have had a real shot at dominating messaging in the US for a long time, and maybe globally as well.

by _ea1k 3y ago

Mountain_Skies 3y ago

They made some pretty bad decisions during their decline. As a developer, it became infuriating how often the signing server was down. You can't push unsigned code to a Blackberry hardware device and the software simulator was not very good at replicating the actual behavior of code on the actual hardware. It was often broken at random for a couple of days but that stretched over a week sometimes. Even correcting a small typo like 'SEX Compliance' that should have been 'SEC Compliance' could take a week because the size of a change didn't matter, everything sent to the device had to be signed by RIM's signing server. This was at a time they were pleading for developers to not abandon the platform for Apple and Android, both of which had much simpler development on testing cycles for their hardware, even if publishing to the actual store could be a chore.

ttul 3y ago

BlackBerry didn’t have a second act. They put all their blackberries in one very nice basket and failed to invest their riches into the kind of deep, speculative R&D that keeps Apple, Microsoft, and Google on the cutting edge on multiple fronts simultaneously, ready to pivot when the opportunity or threat presents itself. Is it a tragedy, though? I think most companies are doing well if they manage to return billions to their initial shareholders by exploiting a breakthrough product for a few years. Companies aren’t meant to last forever. They exist to enrich shareholders for a while - hopefully a long time, but everyone realizes most companies eventually are bought or fail due to changing market conditions.

no_wizard 3y ago
They almost did with BBM. They came really close to getting major telecoms to use it as their backbone to replace SMS / MMS infrastructure. A bit of a shame that never came to fruition honestly
- ttul 3y ago
  I attended the Mobile World Congress in 2012 and what stuck out for me was the total absence of Apple. BlackBerry was there and Google had a massive booth. The telecoms were all promoting their versions of over-the-top messaging, meant to compete with Apple and sustain the declining SMS subscription revenue. I could appreciate the need for the incumbents to come up with _something_ to counteract the iPhone wave, but it all seemed rather hopeless at the time.
  - no_wizard 3y ago
    Telecoms shot themselves in the foot by not going full swing on something with great interop and iMessage features. They should have totally dominated video / multi-media messaging etc. But they all wanted their own proprietary thing, even today. Blackberry came really close to getting major telecoms onboard for adopting BBM as their over the top replacement, but it never closed (iirc they argued about price). I feel that if telecoms realized what they are, which is infrastructure dumb pipes, things like interoperable standards would be easier for them to adopt. Look at the failure of Verizon trying to diversify, they just shut down BlueJeans (a zoom competitor) and haven't really done much with Yahoo since acquisition.
    - ttul 3y ago
      Telecoms by the mid-2000s had long ago lost their innovation mojo, ceding it to the big tech companies after the deregulation push of the late-1990s and over-leveraging to build out internet networks.

maxsilver 3y ago

> I often wonder what they really should have done? They could have pivoted to Android earlier. I had a BlackBerry Q10 and their BB10(QNX) was actually pretty good (the unified messaging was amazing at the time), but it was clear even then that without proper Android app/ecosystem support, it was always doomed to struggle. (their clever emulator was great, but wasn't enough). - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXewkl5K7-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXewkl5K7-M When they finally did pivot to Android, their phones were pretty good (I carried the "BB Priv" for a long time, and the KeyOne was great from my short time with it). But they were way too late by then, and had to face the onslaught of Samsung / LG competition, who all had newer tech at cheaper pricing. A BlackBerry Priv in 2011 might have saved the company, it would be competing against a "Droid Razr" and an iPhone 4S. The Priv actually arrived in 2015, and was competing against a Galaxy S6 Edge and iPhone 6S Plus. It was way too late -- people who loved their keyboards had already learned to survive with "phablet"-sized smartphones for a few years by then.

_ea1k 3y ago
> They could have pivoted to Android earlier. I thought about that. They could have been really competitive with some of the early Droid phones, which were really what brought Android to a lot of people in the early days. But I also remember that a lot of those companies really struggled to reach profitability with their Android phone lines. It was a hypercompetitive space with really low margins. Maybe it would have worked if combined with their security reputation and with BBM.
deltarholamda 3y ago
I found the Android Blackberries terrible. Some good parts, but I am really not a fan of how Android does things. (I use iOS, but under a "best of the worst" protest.) The BB OS was great, if a bit slow. The worst part of it was the terrible browser, which really didn't do it any favors, but the communications part of it was so good I could work around it. I don't care much for any mobile browsers, everything is better on a real computer, but at least Safari doesn't crawl to a stop. I had high hopes for the QNX phones, but RIM sure didn't. But you're right, by the time they had pivoted to Android so they could take advantage of the "App market," it was too late. Having had a BB for so many years, pawing at a screen makes me feel like the monkeys at the Monolith. I used the BB as my primary email tool, it was just that good at what it did.

numpad0 3y ago

They could simply launched and maintained Android and BBOS lines, both initially with keyboards and later touch, until both OS options could be converged(and keyboard removed if needed). The question should be, why the RIM/BB as a company couldn't tread the obvious path forward, and QWOP'd on spot?

phonon 3y ago

Focused on BlackBerry Messenger (put it on Android and iOS app stores). WhatsApp sold for $19.3 Billion. BBM could have been bigger.

xethos 3y ago
One of the founders / Co-CEOs wanted to do just this. He was over-ruled, and sometimes I wonder which one is more bitter about (effectively) losing their company - Jim (IIRC), who played Cassandra and was ignored, or Mike, who didn't trust him enough.
- phonon 3y ago
  Led to him quitting, yup. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/balsillie-quit-blackberry-over-nixed-bbm-plan-report-1.1872572 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/balsillie-... 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...
_ea1k 3y ago
That is a really good point. They'd have had a real shot at dominating messaging in the US for a long time, and maybe globally as well.