4 ms·

Blackberry's was the case of being too much in love with their own beliefs and processes. Also known as inability to adapt to changing circumstances. Microsoft

Blackberry's was the case of being too much in love with their own beliefs and processes. Also known as inability to adapt to changing circumstances. Microsoft also has those tendencies but they tend to get their act somewhat together even if that's too late. Lazaridis saw the iPhone and the Engineer in him went - the battery won't last and it will bring down the AT&T network with its full fledged browser. Ballmer saw the iPhone and laughed at the $500 price. Both did not see the potential from a changing market's standpoint. Battery tech gets better, hardware, networks and OSes get better every year, and the prices can and do fall. But some of it was inevitable for Blackberry. There really wasn't any differentiation potential left behind for them. iPhone got the smooth, attractive, computer replacement part. Android got the customizable, ubiquitous, many options, open and the "not iPhone" part. There just wasn't any way for BB to differentiate and win. They could've had a perfectly smooth touch optimized OS with great BB hardware, security suite and BBM etc. and even then their target market would still be limited. The only way they could've saved themselves was if they had innovated ahead of time. After the iPhone and Android it was game over for them.

josh2600 13y ago
How can you innovate when the standard for your product is Java 1.3? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959705
- blinkingled 13y ago
  If they had bought QNX early and switched to either a recent Java version or another decent language - even something like webOS HTML5/JS/CSS would've worked given a sane looking UI and frameworks.
  - josh2600 13y ago
    I wish I could find the quote but there's a long discussion by a former-RIM employee about the inability of management to come to consensus. To my mind, that's also incredibly ironic because RIM had the dual-CEOs for specifically this reason, to avoid conflict over technical and operational requirements. Edit: Look what I found!!! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6462453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6462453
bane 13y ago
I think it also would have been hideously difficult for BB to dev, market and sell two entirely different kinds of devices. I think there's really been 3 kinds of smartphones: 1) The Microsoft model - shrink a desktop down into a phone display and since everything is so little now, use a stylus to pick at things on the screen. You can definitely see an older MS smartphone and still see it as being a smartphone. 2) The BB model - optimize for most common use-cases and provide a dedicated set of physical inputs to operate. These days, feature phones pretty much do everything a BB can do, but the interface into the capabilities suck. The classic BB phone is very much a feature phone on steroids. A nicer screen, better input but good hardware build quality and excellent email services. It turns out that turing machines are turing machines and BB eventually figured out you can run other kinds of apps on the devices, but their pedigree is very much an amped up feature phone. 3) The iPhone model. Grids and capacitive touchscreens. Let's be honest here, Android started as a copy of the BB model, early Android phones even had a similar set of input mechanisms. The iPhone model is interesting in that it was just like the Microsoft model in the sense that it was just a cheap portable computing device where "phone" was just an application on the computer. But unlike Microsoft they didn't just take the obvious route of just shrinking down the desktop into an unusable and fussy tiny screen. They developed a different kind of interface. Also, if you squint just a tiny little bit, it looks kinda like the mobile interface model that BB used, but instead of a wheel or ball or whatever to navigate and a keyboard to type, they simplified and just did everything on a bigger screen. Pulling these two influences together into what we have now, and being willing to deal with the tradeoffs (lack of precision input and the "feel" of a keyboard + the reduced battery life and added component cost) was really innovative and daring. It was so impressive that Google completely redirected and pivoted Android from the BB model to the iPhone model.
cleaver 13y ago
One of Blackberry's key barriers to innovation was that they were unwilling to cannibalize their existing revenue. It was quite substantial revenue, so I would understand the beancounters' reticence. To connect a Blackberry to your own mail server, you needed expensive software and the enterprise level of network service. While BB did start to offer consumer data plans, you could not use them with your own mail server. When the iPhone came to Canada, I did the math and traded the blackberry for an iPhone.
tracker1 13y ago
I think that BB should have done two things... First, double-down on enterprise customers. Second, offer BB branded applications for iOS and Android phones. They could have been best-in-breed applications, and still kept devices with physical keyboards for their enterprise/die-hard customers. They had a feature set that was early on, unmatched, and enough developer insight/knowledge and codebase that they could have beat other competitors at the application level for integrated contact/calendar/mail solutions for exchange integration.

josh2600 13y ago

How can you innovate when the standard for your product is Java 1.3? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959705

blinkingled 13y ago
If they had bought QNX early and switched to either a recent Java version or another decent language - even something like webOS HTML5/JS/CSS would've worked given a sane looking UI and frameworks.
- josh2600 13y ago
  I wish I could find the quote but there's a long discussion by a former-RIM employee about the inability of management to come to consensus. To my mind, that's also incredibly ironic because RIM had the dual-CEOs for specifically this reason, to avoid conflict over technical and operational requirements. Edit: Look what I found!!! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6462453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6462453

bane 13y ago

I think it also would have been hideously difficult for BB to dev, market and sell two entirely different kinds of devices. I think there's really been 3 kinds of smartphones: 1) The Microsoft model - shrink a desktop down into a phone display and since everything is so little now, use a stylus to pick at things on the screen. You can definitely see an older MS smartphone and still see it as being a smartphone. 2) The BB model - optimize for most common use-cases and provide a dedicated set of physical inputs to operate. These days, feature phones pretty much do everything a BB can do, but the interface into the capabilities suck. The classic BB phone is very much a feature phone on steroids. A nicer screen, better input but good hardware build quality and excellent email services. It turns out that turing machines are turing machines and BB eventually figured out you can run other kinds of apps on the devices, but their pedigree is very much an amped up feature phone. 3) The iPhone model. Grids and capacitive touchscreens. Let's be honest here, Android started as a copy of the BB model, early Android phones even had a similar set of input mechanisms. The iPhone model is interesting in that it was just like the Microsoft model in the sense that it was just a cheap portable computing device where "phone" was just an application on the computer. But unlike Microsoft they didn't just take the obvious route of just shrinking down the desktop into an unusable and fussy tiny screen. They developed a different kind of interface. Also, if you squint just a tiny little bit, it looks kinda like the mobile interface model that BB used, but instead of a wheel or ball or whatever to navigate and a keyboard to type, they simplified and just did everything on a bigger screen. Pulling these two influences together into what we have now, and being willing to deal with the tradeoffs (lack of precision input and the "feel" of a keyboard + the reduced battery life and added component cost) was really innovative and daring. It was so impressive that Google completely redirected and pivoted Android from the BB model to the iPhone model.

cleaver 13y ago

One of Blackberry's key barriers to innovation was that they were unwilling to cannibalize their existing revenue. It was quite substantial revenue, so I would understand the beancounters' reticence. To connect a Blackberry to your own mail server, you needed expensive software and the enterprise level of network service. While BB did start to offer consumer data plans, you could not use them with your own mail server. When the iPhone came to Canada, I did the math and traded the blackberry for an iPhone.

tracker1 13y ago

I think that BB should have done two things... First, double-down on enterprise customers. Second, offer BB branded applications for iOS and Android phones. They could have been best-in-breed applications, and still kept devices with physical keyboards for their enterprise/die-hard customers. They had a feature set that was early on, unmatched, and enough developer insight/knowledge and codebase that they could have beat other competitors at the application level for integrated contact/calendar/mail solutions for exchange integration.