4 ms·

> but they were not powerful enough as a company to keep a third phone standard going. They absolutely were, which is the tragedy of the whole thing, people

> but they were not powerful enough as a company to keep a third phone standard going. They absolutely were, which is the tragedy of the whole thing, people absolutely loved their products and strongly preferred them to everything else on the market. Instead of recognizing the game changer that the iPhone was they slept on the market and didn't do much to bring big touch screens and rich internet applications to their platform. It was a slow and agonizing death.

asveikau 2y ago
> Instead of recognizing the game changer that the iPhone was they slept on the market But they made that error long before buying QNX. By the time they bought QNX they had probably lost too much ground to turn it around.
- Tsarbomb 2y ago
  Hard disagree. While they had lost a ton of ground people were still sporting blackberries in large numbers. The absolute bone headed move they did is they continued to promote and sell their legacy models front and centre cannibalizing their own future growth. There were other issues that were much smaller in the bigger picture like android app support on BB10 coming a little late as well as the devices in general had a somewhat underpowered SoC. All of these contributed to slow adoption, but the fact they were promoting new models of the Bold while their warehouses were full of the Z10 was really what did them in.
  - asveikau 2y ago
    > The absolute bone headed move they did is they continued to promote and sell their legacy models front and centre cannibalizing their own future growth. That's kind of exactly what I meant, though. Nokia made an almost identical mistake, before the Microsoft acquisition, by not doing a timely migration path from Symbian to Meego. The old business was a cash cow so they kept it going, not taking the new thing seriously.
  - justsomehnguy 2y ago
    > promoting new models of the Bold while their warehouses were full of the Z10 Not familiar with BB lineage I checked the Wiki for the release dates and ... wow. Not quite an offtopic: people bash me when I point out what Burning Platform is the result of the previous Nokia shenanigans, so blaming it all on Elop is like blaming the fire for charring your steak you forgot on the BBQ.
jasoneckert 2y ago
They may have been powerful enough in size and monetary resources, but not in process, structure, or vision. RIM (later BlackBerry) was a tech company that wasn't really run like a tech company - it was run like an insurance company, with a full fledged bureaucracy governed by their legal department. And as a result, when competition from Apple and Google came, they couldn't pivot to compete beyond a snail's pace and faded into the sunset very quickly.
- tejohnso 2y ago
  I don't think they had much of a chance with that level of competition. Apple was able to completely shift the market from RIM's strength, which was their full physical keyboard. The screen was for basic productivity applications, and messenger, not for input. There was no app ecosystem. It took years before Blackberry came out with a touchscreen version and it was lackluster. By that time most people who weren't diehard RIM keyboard lovers had already switched anyway.
- Varriount 2y ago
  Do you know of any good sources to read about this (the internals of RIM/BlackBerry and its downfall)?
  - ExoticPearTree 2y ago
    There's a pretty nice movie about Blackberry's rise and fall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_(film)
  - jasoneckert 2y ago
    There's also a great book on it too: https://www.amazon.ca/Losing-Signal-Spectacular-Rise-BlackBerry-ebook/dp/B00MTTR94U https://www.amazon.ca/Losing-Signal-Spectacular-Rise-BlackBe...
whitten 2y ago
Weren't Blackberry phones almost a requirement for USA government computers ?
lproven 2y ago
> They absolutely were, which is the tragedy of the whole thing, people absolutely loved their products and strongly preferred them to everything else on the market. Concur. I had a Passport and it was a deal-changing sort of device. The universal inbox was amazing technology, which totally reworked how a pocket comms device worked. Sadly as companies gradually dropped BB10 support, although you could run Android messaging clients, those didn't integrate with the BB10 inbox, so gradually the phone got less and less useful. This should have been a reason to demand open comms protocols and legally require all comms-tools vendors to support 3rd party clients. Today, I use Ferdium to connect almost all my comms apps into one client app, but it's just a bloated Electron thing that forcibly unifies dissimilar web apps. It's clever but it's not really a solution. It's a herd of elephants on a seesaw in order to crack a peanut. Never mind laws about cookie banners, it should be a procurement requirement for all government agencies in the free world that all vendors must support a documented protocol so that native client apps can connect. To Slack, Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram, Google $ChatAppOfTheMonth, MS Skype|Teams|Whatever. No web apps, no Javascript, just mandatory lowest-common-denominator local rich clients, so that tools like BB10 could talk to everything. Frankly I don't care if it doesn't support sound or video. I will go quite far to avoid that anyway. But text, basic formatting, smilies, maybe embedded static image files and attachments. Nobody would lose from this.

asveikau 2y ago

> Instead of recognizing the game changer that the iPhone was they slept on the market But they made that error long before buying QNX. By the time they bought QNX they had probably lost too much ground to turn it around.

Tsarbomb 2y ago
Hard disagree. While they had lost a ton of ground people were still sporting blackberries in large numbers. The absolute bone headed move they did is they continued to promote and sell their legacy models front and centre cannibalizing their own future growth. There were other issues that were much smaller in the bigger picture like android app support on BB10 coming a little late as well as the devices in general had a somewhat underpowered SoC. All of these contributed to slow adoption, but the fact they were promoting new models of the Bold while their warehouses were full of the Z10 was really what did them in.
- asveikau 2y ago
  > The absolute bone headed move they did is they continued to promote and sell their legacy models front and centre cannibalizing their own future growth. That's kind of exactly what I meant, though. Nokia made an almost identical mistake, before the Microsoft acquisition, by not doing a timely migration path from Symbian to Meego. The old business was a cash cow so they kept it going, not taking the new thing seriously.
- justsomehnguy 2y ago
  > promoting new models of the Bold while their warehouses were full of the Z10 Not familiar with BB lineage I checked the Wiki for the release dates and ... wow. Not quite an offtopic: people bash me when I point out what Burning Platform is the result of the previous Nokia shenanigans, so blaming it all on Elop is like blaming the fire for charring your steak you forgot on the BBQ.

jasoneckert 2y ago

They may have been powerful enough in size and monetary resources, but not in process, structure, or vision. RIM (later BlackBerry) was a tech company that wasn't really run like a tech company - it was run like an insurance company, with a full fledged bureaucracy governed by their legal department. And as a result, when competition from Apple and Google came, they couldn't pivot to compete beyond a snail's pace and faded into the sunset very quickly.

tejohnso 2y ago
I don't think they had much of a chance with that level of competition. Apple was able to completely shift the market from RIM's strength, which was their full physical keyboard. The screen was for basic productivity applications, and messenger, not for input. There was no app ecosystem. It took years before Blackberry came out with a touchscreen version and it was lackluster. By that time most people who weren't diehard RIM keyboard lovers had already switched anyway.
Varriount 2y ago
Do you know of any good sources to read about this (the internals of RIM/BlackBerry and its downfall)?
- ExoticPearTree 2y ago
  There's a pretty nice movie about Blackberry's rise and fall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_(film)
- jasoneckert 2y ago
  There's also a great book on it too: https://www.amazon.ca/Losing-Signal-Spectacular-Rise-BlackBerry-ebook/dp/B00MTTR94U https://www.amazon.ca/Losing-Signal-Spectacular-Rise-BlackBe...

whitten 2y ago

Weren't Blackberry phones almost a requirement for USA government computers ?

lproven 2y ago

> They absolutely were, which is the tragedy of the whole thing, people absolutely loved their products and strongly preferred them to everything else on the market. Concur. I had a Passport and it was a deal-changing sort of device. The universal inbox was amazing technology, which totally reworked how a pocket comms device worked. Sadly as companies gradually dropped BB10 support, although you could run Android messaging clients, those didn't integrate with the BB10 inbox, so gradually the phone got less and less useful. This should have been a reason to demand open comms protocols and legally require all comms-tools vendors to support 3rd party clients. Today, I use Ferdium to connect almost all my comms apps into one client app, but it's just a bloated Electron thing that forcibly unifies dissimilar web apps. It's clever but it's not really a solution. It's a herd of elephants on a seesaw in order to crack a peanut. Never mind laws about cookie banners, it should be a procurement requirement for all government agencies in the free world that all vendors must support a documented protocol so that native client apps can connect. To Slack, Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram, Google $ChatAppOfTheMonth, MS Skype|Teams|Whatever. No web apps, no Javascript, just mandatory lowest-common-denominator local rich clients, so that tools like BB10 could talk to everything. Frankly I don't care if it doesn't support sound or video. I will go quite far to avoid that anyway. But text, basic formatting, smilies, maybe embedded static image files and attachments. Nobody would lose from this.