
BlackBerry loses $423M in last quarter as revenue plunges - bane
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/blackberry-loses-423-million-in-q4-as-revenue-plunges-1.2588984
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EC1
Good fucking almighty riddance! BlackBerry devices are an absolute nightmare
to develop on. I would know, I have been for the past year for a bank, both
native and jQuery Mobile.

I might go into therapy for a few months once this project is over.

I'm debating whether to even list any of these projects and related skills on
my resume for fear of pigeon holing myself as "the blackberry guy". Honestly
most depressing job.

My environment is a locked down, lenovo x120e, running Windows XP. Awful. It's
sort of good because when I come home to my beautiful $10k+ mac setup, a
single tear roles down my cheek, and I can fire up xcode and do some serious
relaxing. Yes, Objective C relaxes me.

~~~
sirkneeland
For BB7 or BB10? I've always heard the former is a nightmare but not so much
the latter...

~~~
EC1
BB7 & BB10 alike. They are both bad. BB7 is an order of magnitude worse to
develop on.

It's not that BB10 is too bad, it's just that when you run into a specific
problem, likely nobody else on the internet has run into the same problem.

~~~
egeozcan
Isn't it a big project? Can't you get paid support? This is really depressing
to read, especially for me as I may be developing for BB10 in a few weeks.

~~~
candl
ECC1 claims are simply false. His Lenovo x120e can barely handle Eclipse. It's
no wonder the experience is worse than his '10K$ Mac setup' ...

I've developed native apps for BB10. The tooling is decent. It's a bit heavy
since it's based on Eclipse but I had no problems with it. You can also use
QtCreator with BlackBerry 10, but I've never tried it. You will mostly use Qt-
based APIs anyway in your app, so there's no issue with support. The
documentation for BB10 Cascades APIs is very good. There are also lots of
official and community submitted samples on Github. For questions I've always
used their developer forums which were active.

~~~
EC1
Kid, I'm not bullshitting. Believe what you want. It's a fucking awful
experience.

~~~
artmageddon
Just curious, why are you using such a dev environment like the one you
describe for writing BlackBerry apps? Why can't you get a more up-to-date
setup? I can't see any reason to develop in WinXP anymore.

~~~
EC1
Believe me, I can't see any either. They are company issued laptops that need
to follow certain security procedures. I brought in my mac and ported my code,
had like a week of GREAT development before 2 "officials" from the information
security team demanded I delete any and all code in front of them. You are
absolutely not allowed to use anything beyond the company hardware and
software, and I got the short end of the stick as all the good machines have
already been "leased" for other projects.

If there is a god he will deliver me from this place.

~~~
artmageddon
Yeah, I think the problem is the place you work with, not so much BlackBerry
development itself. Though I don't blame you for having a tainted view of it
because of these kind of asinine policies as a result.

------
bane
It's still amazing to me that they haven't produced a keyboarded, skinned,
android device yet.

At this point sticking with only their own OS seems prideful. I'm sure the
internal discussion are about "differentiation". But that swings both ways.
Being different/bad is not the kind of differentiation a company wants.

~~~
valarauca1
Blackberry's Software is DoD audited. If they change OS's they have to go
though a lengthy re-certification program that Samsung KNOX and IOS6 only
completed this 1 year ago.

The US government is one of their major customers, and a lot of business men
and women like the piece of mind their phone is DoD approved for security...
Even if they do nothing else to secure it.

~~~
eli
Didn't they just switch OSes last year? Blackberry 10 is QNX-based.

~~~
valarauca1
Black Berry has owned QNX Since 2010

-Retracted-

Your correct they did push BlackBerry10 in 2013, but BlackBerry 7 (No clue
what happened to 8, and 9) was not an upgrade from 6 and was only available on
newer phones. Which leads me to believe 7 was actually the QNX implementation.

~~~
mcpherrinm
I am very sure BB10 was the first QNX release. Its release slipped many times,
and was over a year late to market.

~~~
jljljl
Wasn't PlayBook a QNX release?

~~~
valarauca1
Yes.

OS: Blackberry Tablet (QNX)

From the BlackBerry Tablet page

"Another QNX-based operating system, known as BlackBerry 10, will replace the
long-standing BlackBerry OS on handsets after version 7."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_PlayBook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_PlayBook)

------
camus2
BlackBerry has great apps and services.

BlackBerry should give up their os and produce Android phones with these
exclusive apps and services. Because nobody's interested in owning a
Blackberry os phone today.

It used to be a "white collar" phone,now the iPhone is the "white collar"
phone.

"Os" wise, Between Android,IOS and WP,there will be a place for a fourth
player only if that player is really innovative,and invent something other
players dont have and markets it well. That's why I dont believe in the
Jollas, and the Firefox oses, nothing new,nothing Android phones cant do.

The whole "html" os stuff has been tried already,it was a failure and android
phones actually ship with browsers... hello? we dont need "html" oses...

As for Jollas,what's the point if It's to use android apps? can already do
that on android phones...

~~~
sirkneeland
The "point" of Jolla isn't to run Android apps. That's a feature. The point is
to have a great mobile Linux device running native (!Java) code and a
beautiful UI and a small but great community of passionate users, devs and the
company.

~~~
camus2
I quote their homepage ,lead paragraph:

    
    
       >Navigate effortlessly with the gesture-based user 
       >interface and load the phone with top Android™ apps.
    

There is your point?

~~~
pekk
Again, being able to use some existing Android apps is a feature, not the
point of the phone

------
djloche
$42M actual loss, $382M in tax accounting fluff.

They're estimating profitability by end of FY2015 (february 2015). That sounds
reasonable, given the investments they're making on the future of the company,
rather than just trying to goose the numbers for stock performance.

BB10 is the best mobile OS I've used, and I'm glad to see they're on track for
turning the company around.

~~~
noir_lord
Not BB10 (Edit: Playbook OS) on the Playbook is _still_ better (imo) than
Android 4.4 on the Nexus 7 (if you adjust for massive hardware differences).

It both _feels_ and _behaves_ engineered, it's an absolute shame that they
where late to the party.

~~~
Torgo
How are you running BB10 on the Playbook? I didn't think it was ever
officially released, just an old, busted preview.

~~~
noir_lord
Whoops my bad, Playbook OS not BB10.

~~~
Torgo
FWIW I agree, Playbook OS is pretty great on the usability front. I'm still
steaming that they reneged on porting BB10 to it though, I only bought one on
that promise.

~~~
noir_lord
I bought two in the Firesale at a silly price (I think I paid less for both
than a single 1st gen Nexus 7 at launch).

They make solid little almost-disposable portable web browsers.

------
Bahamut
Blackberry seems to be the classic example of a company that didn't take the
competition seriously enough while in its prime & thus paid the price. This is
what happens when you aren't constantly vigilant & innovating - you're at risk
from companies that are.

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ihsw
Keep in mind that BlackBerry Limited cut 40% of its workforce (4,500
employees) in September 2013, and in November 2013 they received a $1B cash
injection from Fairfax Financial. If things continue to go poorly in 2014 then
we can expect some more shuffling in leadership.

Competition continues to be quite fierce in the mobile handset market.
Notably, where is HTC's 2013 Annual Report? Surely they're dealing with
similar troubles.

~~~
daimyoyo
Thank you for mentioning the cash injection. I was starting to wonder where
RIM was getting all this money they keep losing quarter after quarter.

------
deft
You know I really don't understand all the comments here cheering for a
company to go under... they made mistakes and their products were behind the
market for quite awhile. but now they have BB10 and it's brilliant and keeps
improving (3 major OS updates in the first year). Even if you personally
dislike BB10, isn't more choice a good thing for the market?

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bcohen5055
Bringing back the bold is an interesting strategy... I'd imagine at this point
it doesn't cost much to manufacture it and they don't see it canabalizing any
BB10 devices. I'm assuming this is a play in markets where BB still has a
shot, (Latin America, Africa, etc.) Places where the Bold may compete against
feature phones and may still be viable. Think of the Bold as a new version of
the Nokia bricks that stayed in production much longer than needed for the US
markets.

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dmalik
BlackBerry 10 is an underrated OS. The move to bring back the Bold is a bad
decision. Nobody supports BBOS7 anymore. Bring in Google Play to BB10 and
start marketing your security.

~~~
apaprocki
Even their security should be questioned:

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/12/bb10_dated_crypto/](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/12/bb10_dated_crypto/)

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sirkneeland
I'm unclear on what Chen meant when he said he was restarting production on
the blackberry bold... Is that referring to the updated version of a keyboard
BB10 device that would have the trackpad or does it literally mean restarting
the BB7 powered Bold device?

~~~
JamilD
"The phone, first introduced in 2011, will be re-released as 'The Classic'."

This seems to indicate that he means it's a new device, the Classic (formerly
known as the Q20 [1]). Seems just like a BB10 version of the Bold.

[1]
[http://blogs.blackberry.com/2014/02/blackberry-q20/](http://blogs.blackberry.com/2014/02/blackberry-q20/)

------
tn13
Good. The bad karma is catching up with this company.

As an individual (against corporate customer) I purchased a Blackberry for
around $400 in India. iPhone was ~$1000 and Android phones were still half as
good as they are now. I quickly realized that the phone was overpriced. Every
app install required restart that involved taking off the battery.

Also, the postpaid plants were 2x more expensive than the prepaid plans purely
because postpaid users had no other choice but to pay up. There was no number
portability in India at that moment.

The company would then provide updates to OS which were carrier specific. OS7
was not compatible with OS6 and BB10 made OS7 totally worthless but not to
mention the company still sold all their phones at a premium.

------
awestley
The death spiral continues. I have to hand it to them, they lasted longer than
I expected.

~~~
mikhailt
I expected a very long death because of the government contracts. Blackberry
isn't going anywhere until a different maker has all of the security
clearances needed to have its devices on the secure network.

I don't think Apple cares. Probably Samsung or Google will do its best to get
those in a few years.

~~~
neurotech1
There are "secure" versions of Android. It's the secure messaging solution
that is bundled with BB that makes it a compelling solution for the
government.

QNX OS is a real-time embedded OS that is popular for embedded applications.
They could close their consumer division and just do government and embedded
product lines and actually be profitable.

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kostyk
There is a very good bullish article on Blackberry.

[http://market-ticker.org/post=228889](http://market-ticker.org/post=228889)

~~~
notastartup
I took a look at it for two seconds and didn't know what the hell was BBOS 12
or 7, never heard of it, never seen it. I'm sure this is what most people
think too who's using iOS or Android, they are beating a dead horse and
failing to innovate themselves out of the hole they created.

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eitally
If they improve the usability of BBM a little bit and get wrap some better PR
around it, they could pretty easily compete with the other big names in SMS-
alternative social networks (Viber, Line, Kik, WeChat, Kakao). As it is,
though -- at least in my circles -- the unwieldiness of the additional fun
stuff (like Glympse integration) pushed us back to WhatsApp and Telegram.

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S_A_P
Not surprising. Even mainstay companies are advocating BYOD now and even if
the reintroduction of the "bold" spurs corporate sales they still need a solid
consumer phone. Not that the z/q10 aren't(never used them) but I don't know
that there is any compelling differentiator to encourage users to switch.

