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The things Blackberry thought mattered most about their product were battery life, "security", email (keyboards, data backend for that) and minimising data usag

The things Blackberry thought mattered most about their product were battery life, "security", email (keyboards, data backend for that) and minimising data usage (makes the carriers happy). The iPhone is a terrible product along those lines. Heck it runs a full blown Unix, compositing graphics, and is positively profligate with data consumption. Asymco covers this in detail, but what happened on the carrier side was they found that iPhone users were prepared to pay more for large data plans (by Blackberry standards) and hence the carrier could subsidise the iPhone price because of that. (Many carriers moved over to the handset subsidy model for the iPhone.) RIM thought carriers were trying to make maximum usage of their network, when in fact they were trying to maximize revenues. Consumers valued full blown Internet access highly and then apps. That led to the iPhone taking off. Blackberry had a platform that was all about economy (use minimal memory, cpu, network etc). They did react hence the QNX acquisition. But Apple and Android both had a head start on them. RIM had to bootstrap a new platform, redevelop most apps, and try to catch up, all in a shorter amount of time than Apple and Android had, also while changing core values (minimalism/efficiency). It would be a rare organization indeed that could pull that off. Globe and Mail have a good long article with the insider details http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-inside-story-of-why-blackberry-is-failing/article14563602/?page=all http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-inside...

hga 13y ago
Thanks for the link, although I can't justify spending more time reading it than getting to the introduction of the Storm, which per my last link, supports my point about technical execution. It's one thing to find it difficult to figure out how to fight a disruptive innovator or a paradigm shift---and the iPhone was mostly the latter, I think, only partly a disruptive innovation since it only did a few things worse than the Blackberry, and the lack of a keyboard was deliberate. It's quite another to make your first product to answer that challenge, that addresses the company's "most important strategic opportunity since the launch of its two-way e-mail pager" and have it fail to work (well). Probably damaging the brand while they were at it, certainly displeasing Verizon Wireless. Companies fail for many reasons, and often for multiple reasons. I'm just pointing out that RIM started to fail in technical delivery, in new products such as the Storm and that silly "can't do email by itself" tablet, and in its core existing business (e.g. email system outages ... and poorly handled ones at that, and probably more as well).
- rogerbinns 13y ago
  I don't think the execution failures are specific to them. They were having to sustain an existing business, plus do accelerated development of a new platform and devices, plus the core apps and libraries on top of that, starting from a laggard position with the competitors having a several year head start, and all the time spent doing this the competitors continue to move ahead. I'd expect the majority of companies to fail at trying to pull that off. Much of it is the kind of work where adding more people will be of no benefit. The surprise isn't that they failed - it is that anyone expected them to succeed!

hga 13y ago

Thanks for the link, although I can't justify spending more time reading it than getting to the introduction of the Storm, which per my last link, supports my point about technical execution. It's one thing to find it difficult to figure out how to fight a disruptive innovator or a paradigm shift---and the iPhone was mostly the latter, I think, only partly a disruptive innovation since it only did a few things worse than the Blackberry, and the lack of a keyboard was deliberate. It's quite another to make your first product to answer that challenge, that addresses the company's "most important strategic opportunity since the launch of its two-way e-mail pager" and have it fail to work (well). Probably damaging the brand while they were at it, certainly displeasing Verizon Wireless. Companies fail for many reasons, and often for multiple reasons. I'm just pointing out that RIM started to fail in technical delivery, in new products such as the Storm and that silly "can't do email by itself" tablet, and in its core existing business (e.g. email system outages ... and poorly handled ones at that, and probably more as well).

rogerbinns 13y ago
I don't think the execution failures are specific to them. They were having to sustain an existing business, plus do accelerated development of a new platform and devices, plus the core apps and libraries on top of that, starting from a laggard position with the competitors having a several year head start, and all the time spent doing this the competitors continue to move ahead. I'd expect the majority of companies to fail at trying to pull that off. Much of it is the kind of work where adding more people will be of no benefit. The surprise isn't that they failed - it is that anyone expected them to succeed!