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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 happe

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.

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.