10 ms·

Inside the fall of BlackBerry: How the smartphone inventor failed to adapt

85 points by r0h1n 13y ago

clarky07 13y ago
This article starts out acting like the release of Z10 was what killed blackberry. Hardly. They were dead long before the Z10, and releasing the Z10 with a keyboard was not the answer. To think it is is laughable. As others have stated, they could have sold high end custom Android phones and done well. They have/(perhaps had) a good brand. If they had released a solid phone like a nexus or galaxy they would have done fine. The execs in the story admitted that their technology was significantly behind. Once they realized that, they should have pivoted to Android. Perhaps keep working on their own stuff behind the scenes to try to catch up. But they can't keep releasing inferior phones and expect to stay on top. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but there are a lot of people on the outside that have said blackberry is making the wrong decisions and headed to failure for quite awhile.
- w1ntermute 13y ago
  The fundamental mistake they made was not realizing that while the smartphone OS had been commoditized by Google, the userland and the hardware had not. What set BlackBerry apart wasn't their OS, it was the userland and associated online services, as well as their keyboard-centric hardware. They wasted precious time and money acquiring and integrating companies like QNX when Android was there for the taking. Skinning it and rebuilding first-party BlackBerry apps on top of it would have been sufficient - the BlackBerry developers would have been happy to port their apps to Android. There's no real good keyboard-centric Android phone out there these days. Motorola's continued to half-assedly release phones in the Droid lineup, but nothing has come close to the OG Droid. That is a niche that BlackBerry could have easily dominated.
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    I've heard good things about those slide-out keyboards that basically convert your touch-oriented phone into an incredibly huge version of the slider-keyboard phones.
- solve 13y ago
  I would buy the shit out of Z10 with a keyboard+pointer. Until a new decent keyboard phone comes out, I'm sticking with my Torch 9800. Also have an HTC One and often use a SG4. Wow, awful. And I hate games.
  - fnbr 13y ago
    Have you tried a 9900? To me, it felt like what the Torch should have been like.
    - solve 13y ago
      I do way too much web browsing (Opera with the text-wrapping setting) for the smaller screen of the 9900, I think, but I never tried it. Strangely, I can't get Opera to work as well on the HTC One, and don't much like the built-in browser.
  - Asterick6 13y ago
    Why not use the trace keyboard? I know Sense 5 on the HTC One comes with a trace keyboard option. It might take a bit of learning to get used to, but using trace keyboards seems to be a lot faster and more efficient than clicking on small physical keyboard buttons. Then again, they don't provide the tactile feedback that a physical keyboard does, so you can't really type with muscle memory and have to look at the screen when trace-typing.
    - JimmyL 13y ago
      >> you can't really type with muscle memory and have to look at the screen when trace-typing. I used to be a devout BlackBerry user, and could happily type out entire emails in meetings with my device under the table, send then, and be 100% confident that I had typed what I was planning on typing. Likewise I could type while walking, and only glance down to see what my incoming messages were. In many jobs, the ability to do that is essential to success. I can't come near that with any type of soft keyboard. Having said all that, I don't use a BB any more - my 9900 died, and I bought a Nexus 4. I was looking at a Q10, but it was $300 more expensive than the Nexus, it still doesn't have anywhere near the number of apps, and I was no longer in a place in life where the key BB features - BBM and the ability to type long emails without looking - mattered any more.
- protomyth 13y ago
  I don't think they had any shot at building a high end Android phone. They just didn't have the culture and I don't think they had the time to get it. Look at the Playbook, it was a business / culture decision that made it suck. They probably should have realized their service had value and if they could have undercut the iPhone price, go after the texters, and hit the pay as you go market ; they could have bought themselves the time to think about what a Blackberry should be as opposed to a iPhone killer.
matthewfournier 13y ago
I think RIM didn't understand how the game had changed. They pioneered the market with secure communications, talk and text, basically a dumbphone +. When Apple entered the market, they partnered with Google for Youtube content and with AT&T for a good data plan. They changed the game from talk and text to consumption of content: data, video, internet, etc. RIM was stuck in the belief that phones were phones, and that their phones were better phones. The iPhone changed the market so that people wanted portable computers that they could access content with. RIM never understood this.
- wsc981 13y ago
  Maybe RIM as a company didn't understand it, but executive Mike Lazardis seemed to realise the threat, since in the article he apparently stated something like "if this thing carries on, we're competing with a Mac, not a Nokia" when talking about the original iPhone.
- flatfilefan 13y ago
  The trade-off is very simple - big screen or battery life. BB believed users are not ready to trade productive phone use for browsing and multimedia. They were wrong. First BB device on multimedia side of this trade-off is Z10. It has a big screen but short batter life. Otherwise fine device, I like it better than Galaxy S3.
seunosewa 13y ago
It's not clear that there's anything at all that they could have done differently that would have made them successful. Releasing BBM on multiple platforms earlier would not have made very much money. Completing BB10 earlier would not have caused it to beat IOS, Android, or Windows Phone. The Playbook would still have failed to iPads, Android tablets, and Window 8 tablets if it was designed as a standalone product. I think they were just doomed, really.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Sell high-end android handsets with blackberry apps and designs that are optimized for business use. Concentrate on other sorts of tooling beyond just email and IM in the mobile business space. Or one of a hundred other ideas that are more sound that what they actually did. RIM innovated once and then stopped, but the world kept changing and passed them by.
  - glesica 13y ago
    Actually an Android handset with some really solid, secure apps and no consumer cruft (copy of some movie you can't delete, Blockbuster app, etc.) would have been pretty killer back when I had a Blackberry through work.
- ksar 13y ago
  In hindsight everything is 20/20, but their survival hinged on their product strategy immediately following the original Storm device. Had they recognized that the original iPhone was being jail-broken to allow third-party developers to build apps/a following, their adoption of something like QNX would have come more quickly.
- Zigurd 13y ago
  > It's not clear that there's anything at all that they could have done differently that would have made them successful. Other than running their business more rationally to give themselves a better chance, I think that's about right. They could have been the third touchscreen OS, but they just didn't make it.
logicallee 13y ago
But adapt to what: some of us remember Steve Jobs on stage showing the leading smart phones. He said he would make one that's smarter than all of them. And easier to use than all of them. Then he put the leading blackberries up. He said that half of it was plastic buttons. But plastic buttons don't adapt to the context: they have something printed on them. So how do you solve this? Then he said, it turns out we did solve this, in software: with soft buttons. Button text changes dynamically. So, he would make one giant screen. Then he said, well, how do you interact with it? Then he derided styluses as something you lose. Then he showed off multitouch. And that was the start of the fal of BlackBerry. People reduce the value of ideas to 0. But look at this luminary: the single idea, that we want something smarter than any phone (as powerful as a computer ,which is what they shrank down) and easier to use than any phone. Then, if you want something easier to use you can't have plastic keys with stuff printed on them. Then, a giant screen. Then, finger interaction. So much complexity drilled down in such a high-level way. That is what separate(s/d) a $400B company from yours. Or from BlackBerry, which failed to adapt. Pure idea.
- noir_lord 13y ago
  I'd still buy the crap out of a Desire-Z form factor with modern hardware (say Nexus 4 or better). The touch screen is superior for lots of uses but when it comes to entering none-english text (code, operating a shell) it falls flat on it's face. Of course if we are talking about fantasy tech I want the Psion 5MX form factor with a 1920x1200 screen and capable of running something like Raspbian ;).
  - auggierose 13y ago
    Yeah, operating a shell, that's EXACTLY what I want to do on my smartphone. Jesus.
    - noir_lord 13y ago
      Yes because your use case is the only use case. There are times when been able to login to a server via my mobile is really useful (generally to give a misbehaving process a good swift kicking) and any keyboard that would make a shell easier to operate would also make typing text messages, emails etc easier.
sami36 13y ago
-- "Verizon wanted an iPhone Killer" -- "How on earth did AT&T allow this ?" exclaimed an exasperated Lazaridis about the iPhone including a network challenging REAL browser -- "Fortune 500 CIOs gathered...." The one long running thread along all of this article is how clueless BBRY was as to who their REAL customers were. It was anybody but the people holding their handsets in the palms. The end users never mattered.
socrates1998 13y ago
I never liked the keyboard, but for a while, it was the best thing around. Blackberry was dead when they didn't recognize the iPhone's impact. They could have easily have developed something to compete with it, while still having the keyboard line of products. They scoffed at the iPhone, then ignored Android. Now they are paying for it. Pride comes before the fall.
pinaceae 13y ago
seems they read about disruptive innovation and tried it with QNX - and fell on their face. christensen is correct in his observations on how disruptions happen, but his proposed countermeasures don't seem to work in a lot of real world situations. BB tried to run the QNX as a separate disruptive unit which is a really bad idea if you intent to migrate your existing customers from A to B. announcing B will kill A before B is ready, etc. BBM for all platforms would have been truly disruptive. Change the playing board, not just some pieces. WhatsApp, etc. show that this is indeed a market. BB had it right before them but got distracted by their handset/keyboard business. The renaming of RIM to BB would have been the perfect moment to split the company. RIM for BBM, services, network - and BB for the hardware plus OS. RIM could have had a future. All easier said than done of course, but those execs earn a lot of money to execute exactly these kind of maneuvers.
- Zigurd 13y ago
  QNX was too far from being competitive with iOS and Android. It still doesn't have a competitive app runtime environment. QNX turned out to be a distraction and time-sink instead of an advantage. It's easy to build a case that Linux is less than completely optimal as a kernel for a phone OS. It is much harder to enumerate all the tasks to beat Linux, and budget all the resources to do it, and not lose your nerve as parts of projects slip, and end up shipping something half-baked. And then you end up in a death spiral where you don't have the resources to fill the gaps and you never catch up.
  - pinaceae 13y ago
    my point is that the OS here doesn't matter, switching an OS is very likely not enough to be disruptive. say they would have switched to android - so what? now they would gave been on equal footing with samsung, etc, but with no reason for anyone to switch to BB at all. you disrupt into a completely different market, not the same with something that's now equal at best.
    - slantyyz 13y ago
      > switching an OS is very likely not enough to be disruptive You're right. It's not disruptive at all, especially if all your core services (address book, calendar, etc.) are stored with a platform independent cloud service (read as: everything outside of iCloud, koff koff). Switching these days usually involves a short, tedious process of entering in all your passwords.
kaoD 13y ago
> The plan was to push wireless carriers to adopt RIM’s popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) instant messaging service as a replacement for their short text messaging system (SMS) applications – no matter what kind of phone their customers used. I doubt that would've saved Blackberry or even that they could've pulled it off. How could they convince (extort) carriers? Banning non-compliant carriers from selling Blackberry? Good luck with that (especially with other phone manufacturers pushing too).
alphakappa 13y ago
>>“The problem wasn’t that we stopped listening to customers,” said one former RIM insider. “We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did. Consumers would say, ‘I want a faster browser.’ We might say, ‘You might think you want a faster browser, but you don’t want to pay overage on your bill.’ ‘Well, I want a super big very responsive touchscreen.’ ‘Well, you might think you want that, but you don’t want your phone to die at 2 p.m.’ “We would say, ‘We know better, and they’ll eventually figure it out.’ ” Seems like they never stopped to think beyond the existing limitations, and what people would put up with for a better experience with the phone. Incumbents [1] tend to imagine that the problems they have identified (and decided to be unsolvable at the moment) are unsolvable for any newcomer too. 1. Motorola had tried touchscreen smartphones before [2] and they had failed. They did not understand at the time that the reason for the failure was not because users did not want touchscreen phones, but because their implementation broke no new ground. It was simply an archaic OS running on a touchscreen that required a stylus. 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_A1000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_A1000
- msh 13y ago
  I had a A1000 and actually liked it compared to what else I could get at the time, but I used it more as a PDA with 3G internet than a phone. Its main drawback was the resistive screen and bad battery life.
  - alphakappa 13y ago
    I used it as my main phone for many months. The battery life was indeed bad. It had many features, such as a web browser. However, like most phones of the day, they weren't quite usable. I never used anything other than th main phone function. When Apple put a full featured browser in the phone, along with a usable map app, it was quite the revelation to me.
- bsg75 13y ago
  >>>“The problem wasn’t that we stopped listening to customers,” said one former RIM insider. The pattern of failure is predictable. When "executives" want to subsist on momentum, and view R&D as a pure expense (at a cost to their bonuses), the end is near.
auctiontheory 13y ago
The problem with this article is that you could write about similar infighting and bureaucracy and failed initiatives at the most successful companies, not just the failures. It doesn't identify or explain what was essentially different about the BlackBerry situation. (I don't have the answer. Maybe it's just randomness.)
- flatfilefan 13y ago
  My take is that they could not manage the team growth that was supposed to support their business growth. When team was relatively small they could execute well. After they grew and had to hire just to fill those new positions random people dragged them down. The quality of late BB OS6 and 7 was awful compared to the 5th. This all happened when they were making good sales and were still growing.
  - auctiontheory 13y ago
    Okay, then the question becomes: how or why was their HR/recruiting worse than at Apple or Google?
    - flatfilefan 13y ago
      Harder to get (new) top people into Canada? Or just because their HR was plain worse?
TheLegace 13y ago
"To Mr. Lazaridis, a life-long tinkerer who had built an oscilloscope and computer while in high school, the iPhone was a device that broke all the rules. The operating system alone took up 700 megabytes of memory, and the device used two processors. The entire BlackBerry ran on one processor and used 32 MB. Unlike the BlackBerry, the iPhone had a fully Internet-capable browser. That meant it would strain the networks of wireless companies like AT&T Inc., something those carriers hadn’t previously allowed. RIM by contrast used a rudimentary browser that limited data usage." “I said, ‘How did they get AT&T to allow [that]?’ Mr. Lazaridis recalled in the interview at his Waterloo office. “ ‘It’s going to collapse the network.’ And in fact, some time later it did.” You have to give them at least a little bit of forgiveness for having to deal with AT&T/Verizon for so many years. I guess the constraints by their partners never allowed them to innovate.
- bsg75 13y ago
  I wonder if Apple knew, or did not care, that AT&T would have to adapt to carry the traffic?
  - CamperBob2 13y ago
    I can only imagine the battle of reality distortion fields that must have taken place when Jobs first approached AT&T. It must have looked like a bar fight between Yoda and Sauron. Arguably, no one else could have won that battle. Gates, maybe, but he was out of the game by then.
lnanek2 13y ago
I remember talking to a finance girl in NYC and she the only real options were BB or iPhone. BB because it was the most serious, you could type the fastest, iPhone was allowed though. I've seen lots of people in politics, running political campaigns texting canvassers constantly, etc. also love the BB. Well BB tried to switch to being the iPhone and it didn't work. Only reason Android succeeded at copying iPhone is that it is often cheaper and goes through faster hardware iterations through many OEMs so often has better hardware to boot.
- solve 13y ago
  Yes, this is very accurate. In order to understand Blackberry, you have to understand who their users were. These people are all in NYC, and these different values won't be obvious to the SF startup crowd.
- Spooky23 13y ago
  Political people love Blackberries because a BB within a BES community is both secure and makes it easy to obfuscate accountability. You could rotate devices in such a way that you can compartmentalize who can communicate in writing by moving phones around. You can also shut people out by not giving them the list of device PINs for important people. If you've ever worked at a place where the execs frequently "lost" BlackBerries, they were up to something.
wallflower 13y ago
3 years ago, an ex-RIM engineer posted on a well-known Internet forum called ShackNews about his insider perspective. It was immediately deleted by him - but not before making the rounds of the tech blogs (in excerpts). The money quote is that RIM thought the iPhone was impossible... It was not just beyond business scope - it was beyond their worldview. "You guys could have avoided this entire conversation by just defining what Apple created as something more than a smartphone. What we call a smartphone today is a rather different than what was meant when the term was first coined. The first smartphone was pretty much the Nokia Communicator back in the late 90s. It had data connectivity and some limited ability to run applications, and that pretty much what a smartphone was at the time. Today we take it to mean handheld wireless computer that happens to have a phone, but back then if you send a few packets you were a smartphone. I was hired by RIM in 1999 just before they began work on their first phone and spent a good number years writing RIM proprietary protocol stacks that layered on top of the then new GPRS. Coming from a two-way pager background, RIM decided that phones should have two-way push synchronization of pretty much everything that Exchange provided along with a limited WML browser. The general thought was that phones would never have sufficient power density or radios sufficient bandwidth to allow anything more. That was incredibly predictably wrong, but it's how things went down. Along with RIM was Ericsson, Palm, Motorola, and Qualcomm. Motorola came from a similar background as RIM and went on to build very similar devices. Both Nokia and Ericsson had come from phones and had decided feature phones should have far more sophisticated PDA functions. Palm started with PDAs then moved to the phones, but adamantly dismissed ideas like wireless synchronization for years making their first attempts at smart phone far more like early Nokia Communicators than early Blackberrys. Oddly enough, though Nokia made the first smartphone, which was followed by two more with RIM and arguably Palm in 20002, it was Ericsson that popularly coined the term in the mid 2000s. So the point is that all these companies were fighting over what amounts to overgrown PDAs with phones and wireless stacks strapped on. Everyone assumed power density was no where even close to what was needed for general computing, that a full featured browser and heavy duty Internet services were impossible due to bandwidth and latency. Take a look at how our Java expert groups named standards, how people at the time talked about what features smart phones should have, and its clear that no one thought an iPhone was possible. Even Danger, which eventually went on to work on to create Windows Phone 7 and Android, was just working on a better Blackberry. The iPhone did many amazing things, but what stands out in my mind was how it proved that these assumptions were flat-out wrong beyond any reasonable doubt. Apple pretty gave everyone the finger and said, "Fuck you guys we can build your distant impossible future today." I left RIM back in 2006 just months before the IPhone launched and I remember talking to friends from RIM and Microsoft about what their teams thought about it at the time. Everyone was utterly shocked. RIM was even in denial the day after the iPhone was announced with all hands meets claiming all manner of weird things about iPhone: it couldn't do what they were demonstrating without an insanely power hungry processor, it must have terrible battery life, etc. Imagine their surprise when they disassembled an iPhone for the first time and found that the phone was battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it. It was ridiculous, it was brilliant. I really don't think you're giving Apple enough credit here. They did something amazing that many very prominent people in the industry thought was either impossible or at least a decade away, and they did it in a disgustingly short time frame." Via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2044389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2044389
brudgers 13y ago
I love having a physical keyboard on my phone. I wish someone made one phone sized and with Bluetooth.
rbanffy 13y ago
"smartphone inventor"... Journalists these days can't even do basic research... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon
zbowling 13y ago
What annoys me is that the BB10 OS is pretty damn awesome. I would even venture to say that it's even better for developers than Google's Android platform for being able to get code running from existing code bases. It may not be running a world class kernel like Linux (it uses QNX) but it has a decent userland with lots of industry standard awesome libraries exposed, unlike the undocumented bionic and high level java you are forced to use on Android. It literally is a dream developing and porting code to it over Android (I work at YC startup that develops a tech for porting). Business decisions and past mistakes aside, it saddens me that BB10 is more prevalent so I can use it over the alternatives as an engineer.
- jacquesm 13y ago
  > It may not be running a world class kernel like Linux (it uses QNX) QnX is in many ways lightyears ahead of Linux. What do you mean with 'world class kernel'?
  - zbowling 13y ago
    Drivers, scheduler, and missing things I could get from things like procfs in Linux that doesn't have an equivalent. I have a had a few issues with GL on QNX as well. It's pretty amazing but not nearly as rigorously tested.
bsg75 13y ago
This is almost painful to read - rushed, still late, yet, broken. Quick and dirty is not always quick, but its often dirty: "The product was the BlackBerry Storm. It was the most complex and ambitious project the company had ever done, but “the technology was cobbled together quickly and wasn’t quite ready,” said one former senior company insider who was involved in the project." "The product was months late, hitting the market just before U.S. Thanksgiving in 2008. Many customers hated it. The touchscreen, RIM’s first, was awkward to manipulate. The product ran on a single processor and was slow and buggy."

85 points by r0h1n 13y ago

This article starts out acting like the release of Z10 was what killed blackberry. Hardly. They were dead long before the Z10, and releasing the Z10 with a keyboard was not the answer. To think it is is laughable. As others have stated, they could have sold high end custom Android phones and done well. They have/(perhaps had) a good brand. If they had released a solid phone like a nexus or galaxy they would have done fine. The execs in the story admitted that their technology was significantly behind. Once they realized that, they should have pivoted to Android. Perhaps keep working on their own stuff behind the scenes to try to catch up. But they can't keep releasing inferior phones and expect to stay on top. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but there are a lot of people on the outside that have said blackberry is making the wrong decisions and headed to failure for quite awhile.

w1ntermute 13y ago
The fundamental mistake they made was not realizing that while the smartphone OS had been commoditized by Google, the userland and the hardware had not. What set BlackBerry apart wasn't their OS, it was the userland and associated online services, as well as their keyboard-centric hardware. They wasted precious time and money acquiring and integrating companies like QNX when Android was there for the taking. Skinning it and rebuilding first-party BlackBerry apps on top of it would have been sufficient - the BlackBerry developers would have been happy to port their apps to Android. There's no real good keyboard-centric Android phone out there these days. Motorola's continued to half-assedly release phones in the Droid lineup, but nothing has come close to the OG Droid. That is a niche that BlackBerry could have easily dominated.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  I've heard good things about those slide-out keyboards that basically convert your touch-oriented phone into an incredibly huge version of the slider-keyboard phones.
solve 13y ago
I would buy the shit out of Z10 with a keyboard+pointer. Until a new decent keyboard phone comes out, I'm sticking with my Torch 9800. Also have an HTC One and often use a SG4. Wow, awful. And I hate games.
- fnbr 13y ago
  Have you tried a 9900? To me, it felt like what the Torch should have been like.
  - solve 13y ago
    I do way too much web browsing (Opera with the text-wrapping setting) for the smaller screen of the 9900, I think, but I never tried it. Strangely, I can't get Opera to work as well on the HTC One, and don't much like the built-in browser.
- Asterick6 13y ago
  Why not use the trace keyboard? I know Sense 5 on the HTC One comes with a trace keyboard option. It might take a bit of learning to get used to, but using trace keyboards seems to be a lot faster and more efficient than clicking on small physical keyboard buttons. Then again, they don't provide the tactile feedback that a physical keyboard does, so you can't really type with muscle memory and have to look at the screen when trace-typing.
  - JimmyL 13y ago
    >> you can't really type with muscle memory and have to look at the screen when trace-typing. I used to be a devout BlackBerry user, and could happily type out entire emails in meetings with my device under the table, send then, and be 100% confident that I had typed what I was planning on typing. Likewise I could type while walking, and only glance down to see what my incoming messages were. In many jobs, the ability to do that is essential to success. I can't come near that with any type of soft keyboard. Having said all that, I don't use a BB any more - my 9900 died, and I bought a Nexus 4. I was looking at a Q10, but it was $300 more expensive than the Nexus, it still doesn't have anywhere near the number of apps, and I was no longer in a place in life where the key BB features - BBM and the ability to type long emails without looking - mattered any more.
protomyth 13y ago
I don't think they had any shot at building a high end Android phone. They just didn't have the culture and I don't think they had the time to get it. Look at the Playbook, it was a business / culture decision that made it suck. They probably should have realized their service had value and if they could have undercut the iPhone price, go after the texters, and hit the pay as you go market ; they could have bought themselves the time to think about what a Blackberry should be as opposed to a iPhone killer.

matthewfournier 13y ago

I think RIM didn't understand how the game had changed. They pioneered the market with secure communications, talk and text, basically a dumbphone +. When Apple entered the market, they partnered with Google for Youtube content and with AT&T for a good data plan. They changed the game from talk and text to consumption of content: data, video, internet, etc. RIM was stuck in the belief that phones were phones, and that their phones were better phones. The iPhone changed the market so that people wanted portable computers that they could access content with. RIM never understood this.

wsc981 13y ago
Maybe RIM as a company didn't understand it, but executive Mike Lazardis seemed to realise the threat, since in the article he apparently stated something like "if this thing carries on, we're competing with a Mac, not a Nokia" when talking about the original iPhone.
flatfilefan 13y ago
The trade-off is very simple - big screen or battery life. BB believed users are not ready to trade productive phone use for browsing and multimedia. They were wrong. First BB device on multimedia side of this trade-off is Z10. It has a big screen but short batter life. Otherwise fine device, I like it better than Galaxy S3.

seunosewa 13y ago

It's not clear that there's anything at all that they could have done differently that would have made them successful. Releasing BBM on multiple platforms earlier would not have made very much money. Completing BB10 earlier would not have caused it to beat IOS, Android, or Windows Phone. The Playbook would still have failed to iPads, Android tablets, and Window 8 tablets if it was designed as a standalone product. I think they were just doomed, really.

InclinedPlane 13y ago
Sell high-end android handsets with blackberry apps and designs that are optimized for business use. Concentrate on other sorts of tooling beyond just email and IM in the mobile business space. Or one of a hundred other ideas that are more sound that what they actually did. RIM innovated once and then stopped, but the world kept changing and passed them by.
- glesica 13y ago
  Actually an Android handset with some really solid, secure apps and no consumer cruft (copy of some movie you can't delete, Blockbuster app, etc.) would have been pretty killer back when I had a Blackberry through work.
ksar 13y ago
In hindsight everything is 20/20, but their survival hinged on their product strategy immediately following the original Storm device. Had they recognized that the original iPhone was being jail-broken to allow third-party developers to build apps/a following, their adoption of something like QNX would have come more quickly.
Zigurd 13y ago
> It's not clear that there's anything at all that they could have done differently that would have made them successful. Other than running their business more rationally to give themselves a better chance, I think that's about right. They could have been the third touchscreen OS, but they just didn't make it.

logicallee 13y ago

But adapt to what: some of us remember Steve Jobs on stage showing the leading smart phones. He said he would make one that's smarter than all of them. And easier to use than all of them. Then he put the leading blackberries up. He said that half of it was plastic buttons. But plastic buttons don't adapt to the context: they have something printed on them. So how do you solve this? Then he said, it turns out we did solve this, in software: with soft buttons. Button text changes dynamically. So, he would make one giant screen. Then he said, well, how do you interact with it? Then he derided styluses as something you lose. Then he showed off multitouch. And that was the start of the fal of BlackBerry. People reduce the value of ideas to 0. But look at this luminary: the single idea, that we want something smarter than any phone (as powerful as a computer ,which is what they shrank down) and easier to use than any phone. Then, if you want something easier to use you can't have plastic keys with stuff printed on them. Then, a giant screen. Then, finger interaction. So much complexity drilled down in such a high-level way. That is what separate(s/d) a $400B company from yours. Or from BlackBerry, which failed to adapt. Pure idea.

noir_lord 13y ago
I'd still buy the crap out of a Desire-Z form factor with modern hardware (say Nexus 4 or better). The touch screen is superior for lots of uses but when it comes to entering none-english text (code, operating a shell) it falls flat on it's face. Of course if we are talking about fantasy tech I want the Psion 5MX form factor with a 1920x1200 screen and capable of running something like Raspbian ;).
- auggierose 13y ago
  Yeah, operating a shell, that's EXACTLY what I want to do on my smartphone. Jesus.
  - noir_lord 13y ago
    Yes because your use case is the only use case. There are times when been able to login to a server via my mobile is really useful (generally to give a misbehaving process a good swift kicking) and any keyboard that would make a shell easier to operate would also make typing text messages, emails etc easier.

sami36 13y ago

-- "Verizon wanted an iPhone Killer" -- "How on earth did AT&T allow this ?" exclaimed an exasperated Lazaridis about the iPhone including a network challenging REAL browser -- "Fortune 500 CIOs gathered...." The one long running thread along all of this article is how clueless BBRY was as to who their REAL customers were. It was anybody but the people holding their handsets in the palms. The end users never mattered.

socrates1998 13y ago

I never liked the keyboard, but for a while, it was the best thing around. Blackberry was dead when they didn't recognize the iPhone's impact. They could have easily have developed something to compete with it, while still having the keyboard line of products. They scoffed at the iPhone, then ignored Android. Now they are paying for it. Pride comes before the fall.

pinaceae 13y ago

seems they read about disruptive innovation and tried it with QNX - and fell on their face. christensen is correct in his observations on how disruptions happen, but his proposed countermeasures don't seem to work in a lot of real world situations. BB tried to run the QNX as a separate disruptive unit which is a really bad idea if you intent to migrate your existing customers from A to B. announcing B will kill A before B is ready, etc. BBM for all platforms would have been truly disruptive. Change the playing board, not just some pieces. WhatsApp, etc. show that this is indeed a market. BB had it right before them but got distracted by their handset/keyboard business. The renaming of RIM to BB would have been the perfect moment to split the company. RIM for BBM, services, network - and BB for the hardware plus OS. RIM could have had a future. All easier said than done of course, but those execs earn a lot of money to execute exactly these kind of maneuvers.

Zigurd 13y ago
QNX was too far from being competitive with iOS and Android. It still doesn't have a competitive app runtime environment. QNX turned out to be a distraction and time-sink instead of an advantage. It's easy to build a case that Linux is less than completely optimal as a kernel for a phone OS. It is much harder to enumerate all the tasks to beat Linux, and budget all the resources to do it, and not lose your nerve as parts of projects slip, and end up shipping something half-baked. And then you end up in a death spiral where you don't have the resources to fill the gaps and you never catch up.
- pinaceae 13y ago
  my point is that the OS here doesn't matter, switching an OS is very likely not enough to be disruptive. say they would have switched to android - so what? now they would gave been on equal footing with samsung, etc, but with no reason for anyone to switch to BB at all. you disrupt into a completely different market, not the same with something that's now equal at best.
  - slantyyz 13y ago
    > switching an OS is very likely not enough to be disruptive You're right. It's not disruptive at all, especially if all your core services (address book, calendar, etc.) are stored with a platform independent cloud service (read as: everything outside of iCloud, koff koff). Switching these days usually involves a short, tedious process of entering in all your passwords.

kaoD 13y ago

> The plan was to push wireless carriers to adopt RIM’s popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) instant messaging service as a replacement for their short text messaging system (SMS) applications – no matter what kind of phone their customers used. I doubt that would've saved Blackberry or even that they could've pulled it off. How could they convince (extort) carriers? Banning non-compliant carriers from selling Blackberry? Good luck with that (especially with other phone manufacturers pushing too).

alphakappa 13y ago

>>“The problem wasn’t that we stopped listening to customers,” said one former RIM insider. “We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did. Consumers would say, ‘I want a faster browser.’ We might say, ‘You might think you want a faster browser, but you don’t want to pay overage on your bill.’ ‘Well, I want a super big very responsive touchscreen.’ ‘Well, you might think you want that, but you don’t want your phone to die at 2 p.m.’ “We would say, ‘We know better, and they’ll eventually figure it out.’ ” Seems like they never stopped to think beyond the existing limitations, and what people would put up with for a better experience with the phone. Incumbents [1] tend to imagine that the problems they have identified (and decided to be unsolvable at the moment) are unsolvable for any newcomer too. 1. Motorola had tried touchscreen smartphones before [2] and they had failed. They did not understand at the time that the reason for the failure was not because users did not want touchscreen phones, but because their implementation broke no new ground. It was simply an archaic OS running on a touchscreen that required a stylus. 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_A1000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_A1000

msh 13y ago
I had a A1000 and actually liked it compared to what else I could get at the time, but I used it more as a PDA with 3G internet than a phone. Its main drawback was the resistive screen and bad battery life.
- alphakappa 13y ago
  I used it as my main phone for many months. The battery life was indeed bad. It had many features, such as a web browser. However, like most phones of the day, they weren't quite usable. I never used anything other than th main phone function. When Apple put a full featured browser in the phone, along with a usable map app, it was quite the revelation to me.
bsg75 13y ago
>>>“The problem wasn’t that we stopped listening to customers,” said one former RIM insider. The pattern of failure is predictable. When "executives" want to subsist on momentum, and view R&D as a pure expense (at a cost to their bonuses), the end is near.

auctiontheory 13y ago

The problem with this article is that you could write about similar infighting and bureaucracy and failed initiatives at the most successful companies, not just the failures. It doesn't identify or explain what was essentially different about the BlackBerry situation. (I don't have the answer. Maybe it's just randomness.)

flatfilefan 13y ago
My take is that they could not manage the team growth that was supposed to support their business growth. When team was relatively small they could execute well. After they grew and had to hire just to fill those new positions random people dragged them down. The quality of late BB OS6 and 7 was awful compared to the 5th. This all happened when they were making good sales and were still growing.
- auctiontheory 13y ago
  Okay, then the question becomes: how or why was their HR/recruiting worse than at Apple or Google?
  - flatfilefan 13y ago
    Harder to get (new) top people into Canada? Or just because their HR was plain worse?

TheLegace 13y ago

"To Mr. Lazaridis, a life-long tinkerer who had built an oscilloscope and computer while in high school, the iPhone was a device that broke all the rules. The operating system alone took up 700 megabytes of memory, and the device used two processors. The entire BlackBerry ran on one processor and used 32 MB. Unlike the BlackBerry, the iPhone had a fully Internet-capable browser. That meant it would strain the networks of wireless companies like AT&T Inc., something those carriers hadn’t previously allowed. RIM by contrast used a rudimentary browser that limited data usage." “I said, ‘How did they get AT&T to allow [that]?’ Mr. Lazaridis recalled in the interview at his Waterloo office. “ ‘It’s going to collapse the network.’ And in fact, some time later it did.” You have to give them at least a little bit of forgiveness for having to deal with AT&T/Verizon for so many years. I guess the constraints by their partners never allowed them to innovate.

bsg75 13y ago
I wonder if Apple knew, or did not care, that AT&T would have to adapt to carry the traffic?
- CamperBob2 13y ago
  I can only imagine the battle of reality distortion fields that must have taken place when Jobs first approached AT&T. It must have looked like a bar fight between Yoda and Sauron. Arguably, no one else could have won that battle. Gates, maybe, but he was out of the game by then.

lnanek2 13y ago

I remember talking to a finance girl in NYC and she the only real options were BB or iPhone. BB because it was the most serious, you could type the fastest, iPhone was allowed though. I've seen lots of people in politics, running political campaigns texting canvassers constantly, etc. also love the BB. Well BB tried to switch to being the iPhone and it didn't work. Only reason Android succeeded at copying iPhone is that it is often cheaper and goes through faster hardware iterations through many OEMs so often has better hardware to boot.

solve 13y ago
Yes, this is very accurate. In order to understand Blackberry, you have to understand who their users were. These people are all in NYC, and these different values won't be obvious to the SF startup crowd.
Spooky23 13y ago
Political people love Blackberries because a BB within a BES community is both secure and makes it easy to obfuscate accountability. You could rotate devices in such a way that you can compartmentalize who can communicate in writing by moving phones around. You can also shut people out by not giving them the list of device PINs for important people. If you've ever worked at a place where the execs frequently "lost" BlackBerries, they were up to something.

wallflower 13y ago

3 years ago, an ex-RIM engineer posted on a well-known Internet forum called ShackNews about his insider perspective. It was immediately deleted by him - but not before making the rounds of the tech blogs (in excerpts). The money quote is that RIM thought the iPhone was impossible... It was not just beyond business scope - it was beyond their worldview. "You guys could have avoided this entire conversation by just defining what Apple created as something more than a smartphone. What we call a smartphone today is a rather different than what was meant when the term was first coined. The first smartphone was pretty much the Nokia Communicator back in the late 90s. It had data connectivity and some limited ability to run applications, and that pretty much what a smartphone was at the time. Today we take it to mean handheld wireless computer that happens to have a phone, but back then if you send a few packets you were a smartphone. I was hired by RIM in 1999 just before they began work on their first phone and spent a good number years writing RIM proprietary protocol stacks that layered on top of the then new GPRS. Coming from a two-way pager background, RIM decided that phones should have two-way push synchronization of pretty much everything that Exchange provided along with a limited WML browser. The general thought was that phones would never have sufficient power density or radios sufficient bandwidth to allow anything more. That was incredibly predictably wrong, but it's how things went down. Along with RIM was Ericsson, Palm, Motorola, and Qualcomm. Motorola came from a similar background as RIM and went on to build very similar devices. Both Nokia and Ericsson had come from phones and had decided feature phones should have far more sophisticated PDA functions. Palm started with PDAs then moved to the phones, but adamantly dismissed ideas like wireless synchronization for years making their first attempts at smart phone far more like early Nokia Communicators than early Blackberrys. Oddly enough, though Nokia made the first smartphone, which was followed by two more with RIM and arguably Palm in 20002, it was Ericsson that popularly coined the term in the mid 2000s. So the point is that all these companies were fighting over what amounts to overgrown PDAs with phones and wireless stacks strapped on. Everyone assumed power density was no where even close to what was needed for general computing, that a full featured browser and heavy duty Internet services were impossible due to bandwidth and latency. Take a look at how our Java expert groups named standards, how people at the time talked about what features smart phones should have, and its clear that no one thought an iPhone was possible. Even Danger, which eventually went on to work on to create Windows Phone 7 and Android, was just working on a better Blackberry. The iPhone did many amazing things, but what stands out in my mind was how it proved that these assumptions were flat-out wrong beyond any reasonable doubt. Apple pretty gave everyone the finger and said, "Fuck you guys we can build your distant impossible future today." I left RIM back in 2006 just months before the IPhone launched and I remember talking to friends from RIM and Microsoft about what their teams thought about it at the time. Everyone was utterly shocked. RIM was even in denial the day after the iPhone was announced with all hands meets claiming all manner of weird things about iPhone: it couldn't do what they were demonstrating without an insanely power hungry processor, it must have terrible battery life, etc. Imagine their surprise when they disassembled an iPhone for the first time and found that the phone was battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it. It was ridiculous, it was brilliant. I really don't think you're giving Apple enough credit here. They did something amazing that many very prominent people in the industry thought was either impossible or at least a decade away, and they did it in a disgustingly short time frame." Via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2044389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2044389

brudgers 13y ago

I love having a physical keyboard on my phone. I wish someone made one phone sized and with Bluetooth.

rbanffy 13y ago

"smartphone inventor"... Journalists these days can't even do basic research... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon

zbowling 13y ago

What annoys me is that the BB10 OS is pretty damn awesome. I would even venture to say that it's even better for developers than Google's Android platform for being able to get code running from existing code bases. It may not be running a world class kernel like Linux (it uses QNX) but it has a decent userland with lots of industry standard awesome libraries exposed, unlike the undocumented bionic and high level java you are forced to use on Android. It literally is a dream developing and porting code to it over Android (I work at YC startup that develops a tech for porting). Business decisions and past mistakes aside, it saddens me that BB10 is more prevalent so I can use it over the alternatives as an engineer.

jacquesm 13y ago
> It may not be running a world class kernel like Linux (it uses QNX) QnX is in many ways lightyears ahead of Linux. What do you mean with 'world class kernel'?
- zbowling 13y ago
  Drivers, scheduler, and missing things I could get from things like procfs in Linux that doesn't have an equivalent. I have a had a few issues with GL on QNX as well. It's pretty amazing but not nearly as rigorously tested.

bsg75 13y ago

This is almost painful to read - rushed, still late, yet, broken. Quick and dirty is not always quick, but its often dirty: "The product was the BlackBerry Storm. It was the most complex and ambitious project the company had ever done, but “the technology was cobbled together quickly and wasn’t quite ready,” said one former senior company insider who was involved in the project." "The product was months late, hitting the market just before U.S. Thanksgiving in 2008. Many customers hated it. The touchscreen, RIM’s first, was awkward to manipulate. The product ran on a single processor and was slow and buggy."