
Inside the fall of BlackBerry (2013) - mparramon
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-inside-story-of-why-blackberry-is-failing/article14563602/
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nchelluri
I read this article a while back. Probably my favorite part:

> Mike Lazaridis was at home on his treadmill and watching television when he
> first saw the Apple iPhone in early 2007. There were a few things he didn't
> understand about the product. So, that summer, he pried one open to look
> inside and was shocked. It was like Apple had stuffed a Mac computer into a
> cellphone, he thought.

> To Mr. Lazaridis, a life-long tinkerer who had built an oscilloscope and
> computer while in high school, the iPhone was a device that broke all the
> rules. The operating system alone took up 700 megabytes of memory, and the
> device used two processors. The entire BlackBerry ran on one processor and
> used 32 MB. Unlike the BlackBerry, the iPhone had a fully Internet-capable
> browser. That meant it would strain the networks of wireless companies like
> AT&T Inc., something those carriers hadn't previously allowed. RIM by
> contrast used a rudimentary browser that limited data usage.

~~~
bluedino
Mr. Lazaridis let common sense stop him from building the iPhone. Much like
the article where the author talks about his brain stopping him from creating
YouTube. People are going to upload these massive video files and we're going
to host them for free, and then they're going to sit and stream them all day?
Malarky!

[http://prog21.dadgum.com/39.html](http://prog21.dadgum.com/39.html)

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VLM
"The marketplace has abandoned our business model? OK, we'll just iterate
endless new hardware and firmware until everyone leaves or a miracle happens."

Its a very old story in IT. Some companies survive it, most don't.

~~~
seunosewa
It's very difficult to replace an obsolete business model that was widely
successful with a new one that is equally successful. Such success is rare
enough that achieving it twice in a row requires a lot of luck or really
incompetent competitors (which Android & iOS were certainly not!)

~~~
rbanffy
Blackberry had very successful corporation-friendly software. They could try
to fight BYOD, enter the BYOD fight with decent phones or they could embrace
BYOD and make their server software compatible with Android and iOS and let
corporations go on with unchanged processes.

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initself
I'm looking forward to the release of the Blackberry Classic and hope that
turns the tide. My spidey sense tells me that people are starting more and
more to appreciate old tech, diverse tech, tools that do one job and do it
well. Hopefully instead of machines and platforms dying, their capabilities
can be maintained and used by those who see their value.

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RA_Fisher
They simply failed to realize it was all about the software.

~~~
billyhoffman
Exactly.

Blackberries were, at their heart, 2-way messaging devices with other features
grafted on. iPhones were computer that just happened to have a "Phone" app and
an "SMS" app.

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xces2kill
Blackberry is still alive and well!

Send from my BlackBerry 10 Smartphone.

~~~
rbanffy
Alive, yes. Well, not at all.

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api
Don't emulate your competition.

It's something I see over and over again. Blackberry had a huge loyal user
base around its keyboard model, but they had to emulate the touch screens of
Apple and Google since... well... that's what everyone else was doing.

Result: they lose their loyal customer base who liked that they were
different, and they failed to gain any new customers since people who liked
touch screens were already using their competitors.

~~~
Ntrails
They never stopped having a model with a physical keyboard as far as I know?

From my experience the only thing that kept it's user-base as high as it was
is the glacial pace of change in large company central ITs. Yes, there was a
small holdout of physical keyboard users, and yes they will exist for some
time - but blackberry was not going to continue functioning at that scale.

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jnetterf
This is from September 2013.

