A very good article about what happened at RIM/BB

[Joe1987]

After reading it, I see why they made some of the choices they did, but how those choices caused the company to lose marketshare.

It's one of the most comprehensive articles I've read about the company.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/repo...ackberry-is-failing/article14563602/?page=all

 

[Eug]

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[silverpig]

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[OS]

Long but good article. They point out the inflection point was when VZW asked BB to develop an iphone killer, and they came out with the BB storm.

I had that phone, and it had a nice physical design, but the OS/software was horrible, clunky, buggy and unstable. Using it was an aggravating affair and intermittent BB updates often broke other things while trying to fix something. I never went back to BB products after they foisted that crap onto customers.

The article points out after that fiasco, VZW went to Moto/Google and they came out with the original Droid. I had that too and it was much better product, I stuck with Android for five product generations, well atleast until this recent Google backdoor/datamining fiasco.


In retrospect, I am not sure BB actually realized the significance of the moment when VZW asked them to produce a flagship touchscreen product. If they did they would have spent far more resources developing the Storm and maintaining a high end product line. In effect, BB's own shortcomings gave rise to Android.

 

[silverpig]

Long but good article. They point out the inflection point was when VZW asked BB to develop an iphone killer, and they came out with the BB storm.

I had that phone, and it had a nice physical design, but the OS/software was horrible, clunky, buggy and unstable. Using it was an aggravating affair and intermittent BB updates often broke other things while trying to fix something. I never went back to BB products after they foisted that crap onto customers.

The article points out after that fiasco, VZW went to Moto/Google and they came out with the original Droid. I had that too and it was much better product, I stuck with Android for five product generations, well atleast until this recent Google backdoor/datamining fiasco.


In retrospect, I am not sure BB actually realized the significance of the moment when VZW asked them to produce a flagship touchscreen product. If they did they would have spent far more resources developing the Storm and maintaining a high end product line. In effect, BB's own shortcomings gave rise to Android.

Well the article said they realized it was their biggest strategic opportunity ever.

If they had come out with BB10 then, with VZW backing them, they'd be top of the heap still.

 

[BladeVenom]

I think many of the decisions they made were tough calls, but offering BBM to everyone and setting up a network in China seemed like no-brainers.

 

[Imp]

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That works for more than just one site. I can't believe they made it that easy...

As for the original article... 8 pages? *shudders*

 

[desura]

I'm like 2/3rds the way through, but the BBM 2.0 is brilliant. Who was the dolt who killed it? The z10 was in fact yet another slab of glass touchscreen. That and the playbook were very obviously dumb moves

 

[silverpig]

I'm like 2/3rds the way through, but the BBM 2.0 is brilliant. Who was the dolt who killed it? The z10 was in fact yet another slab of glass touchscreen. That and the playbook were very obviously dumb moves

The Z10 and Playbook would have been awesome if they came out when the Storm came out (or at least versions using tech available at the time), with a fully baked OS.

 

[Joe1987]

Seems the decision process slowed down a lot of potentially great ideas in a very fast moving sector. Look at how fast Samsung executes, they had to slow their flagship device so the consumers didn't get too pissed at them. Hell, Apple moves briskly compared to BB/RIM.

I would have gone with the data sipping browser choice, I wouldn't have predicted the carriers would upgrade their networks.

The China deal was a no brainer, they should have jumped on it.

BBM everywhere would have been killer 2 years ago, had they gone with it, they would have ruled the industry for years.

Verizon was a terrible partner.

 

[MrX8503]

The reason why BB failed is because they started way way too late. They couldn't even release the Z10 for holiday 2012. That was a sign that their death was inevitable.

 

[Belegost]

What I take away from this is

1) Making a fully featured general computing OS that is light enough to run on mobile hardware is a significant effort.

Palm's WebOS, Nokia's Meego, and BB OS10 all tried to react to the iPhone paradigm shift by making a new OS. All of them took so long to produce that the ecosystem would take years to catch up with Android and iOS (both which took 3+ years to make it to market) and unlike MS(WinPhone), Palm, BB and Nokia did not have deep enough pockets to support years of loss on the product while building the ecosystem.

Doubling up on this - note how long it has taken Tizen and Mer(the Meego continuation), and Ubuntu Touch to actually come to market.

2) Too many cooks in the kitchen ruins the soup.

The SMS2.0 plan probably would have worked, BB would have had good enterprise support, and an existing user base to kickstart things. Carriers desperate to hold onto their beloved SMS profit would have bought in. If BB had a released a secure multimedia messaging system and corporate device management app 2 years ago on iOS and Android they could have pulled in the Whatsapp crowd, and kept their corporate customers (who have moved to something like Tangoe for BYOD management) Oops...

3) National pride needs to be set aside to compete in a global environment. One thing that comes up is how much the company seems to be about "being Canadian." QNX was a horrible choice to try to build an OS on, they had previously done embedded OS for specific purposes - i.e. the same thing BB already had. BB needed something more like Android, a general purpose OS fitted to a mobile environment. There is a small possibility that had they picked up a different OS they could have made it to market faster.

 

[WelshBloke]

The reason why BB failed is because they started way way too late. They couldn't even release the Z10 for holiday 2012. That was a sign that their death was inevitable.

They kind of reminded me of Microsoft there.

Massive institutionalised inertia. They were really slow to react to market change, they just picked a course and kept sailing it regardless of the icebergs in the way.

 

[shortylickens]

wasnt as good as the article about 3D Realms.

Oh, but I did agree with some things. The playbook had a superior OS but poor apps. I remember there was no email, calander, contacts, and thats what most BB users need. You had to do that shit thru your phone over bluetooth which was a pain in the butt.
Bad decision.
They also didnt have much in the way of general purpose apps, entertainment, media, games, utility, they had diddly. I went to the app store for the first time and was like "is this all?"
And they were so slow to get stuff out that most users got bored and moved on in the time it took to catch up. I sent mine back after 2 weeks.

 

[shortylickens]

They kind of reminded me of Microsoft there.

Massive institutionalised inertia. They were really slow to react to market change, they just picked a course and kept sailing it regardless of the icebergs in the way.

Its a little more complicated than that.
What was microsoft supposed to do? They couldnt have iOS, Symbian was failing, WebOS was failing, they wouldnt have had anything competitive in Android.

Same for Nokia, they couldnt have iOS and they would have been a very late player to the Android game with nothing special to offer.

Hell even Samsung doesnt have anything truly unique, they just managed to nail down the best parts of Android and make really damn good phones. Thats it, thats enough to keep them on top of the Android pile until motorola or HTC or LG finally play catch up.

 

[WelshBloke]

Its a little more complicated than that.
What was microsoft supposed to do? They couldnt have iOS, Symbian was failing, WebOS was failing, they wouldnt have had anything competitive in Android.

Same for Nokia, they couldnt have iOS and they would have been a very late player to the Android game with nothing special to offer.

Hell even Samsung doesnt have anything truly unique, they just managed to nail down the best parts of Android and make really damn good phones. Thats it, thats enough to keep them on top of the Android pile until motorola or HTC or LG finally play catch up.

Microsoft were pretty massive in the mobile space, they just refused to change till it was too late.

Both Symbian and WinMo just sat there and watched the new kids sail in and steal their sweets. MicroSoft should have weathered the storm a lot better than Symbian as well given that Microsoft had complete control of its OS.

 

[annomander]

I can remember a few years ago when we was developing a new mobile website for a client and having test devices, Android and iPhone were okay to test on, but had to jump through hoops to switch the blackberry to wifi to test on, the system was so un-intuitive it was unbelievable.

Strangely, it was also the only one to throw a misplaced unfinished XML error, which the others let through.

 

[boomhower]

All of this talk about WebOS makes me dearly miss my Palm Pre. While a complete steaming pile of crap of a phone that is still my favorite OS to date.

 

[Dari]

Long but good article. They point out the inflection point was when VZW asked BB to develop an iphone killer, and they came out with the BB storm.

I had that phone, and it had a nice physical design, but the OS/software was horrible, clunky, buggy and unstable. Using it was an aggravating affair and intermittent BB updates often broke other things while trying to fix something. I never went back to BB products after they foisted that crap onto customers.

The article points out after that fiasco, VZW went to Moto/Google and they came out with the original Droid. I had that too and it was much better product, I stuck with Android for five product generations, well atleast until this recent Google backdoor/datamining fiasco.


In retrospect, I am not sure BB actually realized the significance of the moment when VZW asked them to produce a flagship touchscreen product. If they did they would have spent far more resources developing the Storm and maintaining a high end product line. In effect, BB's own shortcomings gave rise to Android.

Hindsight is 20/20. As the article mentioned, they were growing rapidly at the time and the failure of the Storm hardly registered, apparently...

 

[Dari]

Also, how do you sit on a China deal for 2 years? 1 month is a loooooooooooooooooong time these days 2 years may as well be 2000 years. Idiots.