
Inside the fall of BlackBerry: How the smartphone inventor failed to adapt - r0h1n
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-inside-story-of-why-blackberry-is-failing/article14563602
======
sami36
\-- "Verizon wanted an iPhone Killer"

\-- "How on earth did AT&T allow this ?" exclaimed an exasperated Lazaridis
about the iPhone including a network challenging REAL browser

\-- "Fortune 500 CIOs gathered...."

The one long running thread along all of this article is how clueless BBRY was
as to who their REAL customers were. It was anybody but the people holding
their handsets in the palms. The end users never mattered.

------
logicallee
But adapt to what: some of us remember Steve Jobs on stage showing the leading
smart phones. He said he would make one that's smarter than all of them. And
easier to use than all of them.

Then he put the leading blackberries up. He said that half of it was plastic
buttons. But plastic buttons don't adapt to the context: they have something
printed on them. So how do you solve this?

Then he said, it turns out we did solve this, in software: with soft buttons.
Button text changes dynamically.

So, he would make one giant screen. Then he said, well, how do you interact
with it?

Then he derided styluses as something you lose.

Then he showed off multitouch.

And that was the start of the fal of BlackBerry.

People reduce the value of ideas to 0. But look at this luminary: the single
idea, that we want something smarter than any phone (as powerful as a computer
,which is what they shrank down) and easier to use than any phone.

Then, if you want something easier to use you can't have plastic keys with
stuff printed on them.

Then, a giant screen.

Then, finger interaction.

So much complexity drilled down in such a high-level way. That is what
separate(s/d) a $400B company from yours. Or from BlackBerry, which failed to
adapt.

Pure idea.

~~~
noir_lord
I'd still buy the crap out of a Desire-Z form factor with modern hardware (say
Nexus 4 or better).

The touch screen is superior for lots of uses but when it comes to entering
none-english text (code, operating a shell) it falls flat on it's face.

Of course if we are talking about fantasy tech I want the Psion 5MX form
factor with a 1920x1200 screen and capable of running something like Raspbian
;).

~~~
silencio
When it comes to entering non-english text, touchscreens are fantastic for
millions upon millions if not possibly billions of people for reasons other
than "operating a shell".

I didn't have to sell my parents on buying new iPhones, finally, when they saw
me switch from typing rapid English with a friend complete with a random
emoji, to Korean while chatting with a cousin halfway across the world (for
free, I might add, BB really missed an opportunity there), to Chinese
handwriting recognition while still talking to said cousin, and finally
Voiceover (the screenreader) just to demo to my visually impaired dad. Then
setting up Facetime on the big(ger than previous generation iPhones) iPhone 5
display sealed the deal, so to speak.

Touchscreens are fantastic for the average consumer, and they can be great for
techies too. They might fall flat compared to physical keyboards but we're not
the target audience ...and even if I'm not, I do so much more than entering
code or shell commands every day that I'm willing to make that trade in a
heartbeat. Just the flexibility of software keyboards switching languages
being an everyday thing nowadays kind of blows my mind still, having come from
the world of Graffiti and hardware keyboards for years before iPhone.

~~~
masklinn
> When it comes to entering non-english text, touchscreens are fantastic for
> millions upon millions if not possibly billions of people for reasons other
> than "operating a shell".

And for — as you demonstrate — not just entering non-english text but
seamlessly switching between languages even within a single convo.

------
clarky07
This article starts out acting like the release of Z10 was what killed
blackberry. Hardly. They were dead long before the Z10, and releasing the Z10
with a keyboard was not the answer. To think it is is laughable.

As others have stated, they could have sold high end custom Android phones and
done well. They have/(perhaps had) a good brand. If they had released a solid
phone like a nexus or galaxy they would have done fine. The execs in the story
admitted that their technology was significantly behind. Once they realized
that, they should have pivoted to Android. Perhaps keep working on their own
stuff behind the scenes to try to catch up. But they can't keep releasing
inferior phones and expect to stay on top. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but
there are a lot of people on the outside that have said blackberry is making
the wrong decisions and headed to failure for quite awhile.

~~~
solve
I would buy the shit out of Z10 with a keyboard+pointer. Until a new decent
keyboard phone comes out, I'm sticking with my Torch 9800.

Also have an HTC One and often use a SG4. Wow, awful. And I hate games.

~~~
Asterick6
Why not use the trace keyboard? I know Sense 5 on the HTC One comes with a
trace keyboard option. It might take a bit of learning to get used to, but
using trace keyboards seems to be a lot faster and more efficient than
clicking on small physical keyboard buttons. Then again, they don't provide
the tactile feedback that a physical keyboard does, so you can't really type
with muscle memory and have to look at the screen when trace-typing.

~~~
JimmyL
>> you can't really type with muscle memory and have to look at the screen
when trace-typing.

I used to be a devout BlackBerry user, and could happily type out entire
emails in meetings with my device under the table, send then, and be 100%
confident that I had typed what I was planning on typing. Likewise I could
type while walking, and only glance down to see what my incoming messages
were. In many jobs, the ability to do that is essential to success. I can't
come near that with any type of soft keyboard.

Having said all that, I don't use a BB any more - my 9900 died, and I bought a
Nexus 4. I was looking at a Q10, but it was $300 more expensive than the
Nexus, it still doesn't have anywhere near the number of apps, and I was no
longer in a place in life where the key BB features - BBM and the ability to
type long emails without looking - mattered any more.

------
matthewfournier
I think RIM didn't understand how the game had changed. They pioneered the
market with secure communications, talk and text, basically a dumbphone +.

When Apple entered the market, they partnered with Google for Youtube content
and with AT&T for a good data plan. They changed the game from talk and text
to consumption of content: data, video, internet, etc.

RIM was stuck in the belief that phones were phones, and that their phones
were better phones. The iPhone changed the market so that people wanted
portable computers that they could access content with.

RIM never understood this.

~~~
wsc981
Maybe RIM as a company didn't understand it, but executive Mike Lazardis
seemed to realise the threat, since in the article he apparently stated
something like "if this thing carries on, we're competing with a Mac, not a
Nokia" when talking about the original iPhone.

------
TheLegace
"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."

“I said, ‘How did they get AT&T to allow [that]?’ Mr. Lazaridis recalled in
the interview at his Waterloo office. “ ‘It’s going to collapse the network.’
And in fact, some time later it did.”

You have to give them at least a little bit of forgiveness for having to deal
with AT&T/Verizon for so many years. I guess the constraints by their partners
never allowed them to innovate.

~~~
bsg75
I wonder if Apple knew, or did not care, that AT&T would have to adapt to
carry the traffic?

~~~
CamperBob2
I can only imagine the battle of reality distortion fields that must have
taken place when Jobs first approached AT&T. It must have looked like a bar
fight between Yoda and Sauron.

Arguably, no one else could have won that battle. Gates, maybe, but he was out
of the game by then.

------
alphakappa
>>“The problem wasn’t that we stopped listening to customers,” said one former
RIM insider. “We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than
they did. Consumers would say, ‘I want a faster browser.’ We might say, ‘You
might think you want a faster browser, but you don’t want to pay overage on
your bill.’ ‘Well, I want a super big very responsive touchscreen.’ ‘Well, you
might think you want that, but you don’t want your phone to die at 2 p.m.’ “We
would say, ‘We know better, and they’ll eventually figure it out.’ ”

Seems like they never stopped to think beyond the existing limitations, and
what people would put up with for a better experience with the phone.
Incumbents [1] tend to imagine that the problems they have identified (and
decided to be unsolvable at the moment) are unsolvable for any newcomer too.

1\. Motorola had tried touchscreen smartphones before [2] and they had failed.
They did not understand at the time that the reason for the failure was not
because users did not want touchscreen phones, but because their
implementation broke no new ground. It was simply an archaic OS running on a
touchscreen that required a stylus.

2\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_A1000](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_A1000)

~~~
msh
I had a A1000 and actually liked it compared to what else I could get at the
time, but I used it more as a PDA with 3G internet than a phone.

Its main drawback was the resistive screen and bad battery life.

~~~
alphakappa
I used it as my main phone for many months. The battery life was indeed bad.
It had many features, such as a web browser. However, like most phones of the
day, they weren't quite usable. I never used anything other than th main phone
function. When Apple put a full featured browser in the phone, along with a
usable map app, it was quite the revelation to me.

------
pinaceae
seems they read about disruptive innovation and tried it with QNX - and fell
on their face.

christensen is correct in his observations on how disruptions happen, but his
proposed countermeasures don't seem to work in a lot of real world situations.

BB tried to run the QNX as a separate disruptive unit which is a really bad
idea if you intent to migrate your existing customers from A to B. announcing
B will kill A before B is ready, etc.

BBM for all platforms would have been truly disruptive. Change the playing
board, not just some pieces. WhatsApp, etc. show that this is indeed a market.
BB had it right before them but got distracted by their handset/keyboard
business.

The renaming of RIM to BB would have been the perfect moment to split the
company. RIM for BBM, services, network - and BB for the hardware plus OS. RIM
could have had a future. All easier said than done of course, but those execs
earn a lot of money to execute exactly these kind of maneuvers.

~~~
Zigurd
QNX was too far from being competitive with iOS and Android. It still doesn't
have a competitive app runtime environment. QNX turned out to be a distraction
and time-sink instead of an advantage.

It's easy to build a case that Linux is less than completely optimal as a
kernel for a phone OS. It is much harder to enumerate all the tasks to beat
Linux, and budget all the resources to do it, and not lose your nerve as parts
of projects slip, and end up shipping something half-baked. And then you end
up in a death spiral where you don't have the resources to fill the gaps and
you never catch up.

~~~
pinaceae
my point is that the OS here doesn't matter, switching an OS is very likely
not enough to be disruptive.

say they would have switched to android - so what? now they would gave been on
equal footing with samsung, etc, but with no reason for anyone to switch to BB
at all. you disrupt into a completely different market, not the same with
something that's now equal at best.

~~~
slantyyz
> switching an OS is very likely not enough to be disruptive

You're right. It's not disruptive at all, especially if all your core services
(address book, calendar, etc.) are stored with a platform independent cloud
service (read as: everything outside of iCloud, koff koff). Switching these
days usually involves a short, tedious process of entering in all your
passwords.

------
zbowling
What annoys me is that the BB10 OS is pretty damn awesome. I would even
venture to say that it's even better for developers than Google's Android
platform for being able to get code running from existing code bases. It may
not be running a world class kernel like Linux (it uses QNX) but it has a
decent userland with lots of industry standard awesome libraries exposed,
unlike the undocumented bionic and high level java you are forced to use on
Android. It literally is a dream developing and porting code to it over
Android (I work at YC startup that develops a tech for porting). Business
decisions and past mistakes aside, it saddens me that BB10 is more prevalent
so I can use it over the alternatives as an engineer.

~~~
jacquesm
> It may not be running a world class kernel like Linux (it uses QNX)

QnX is in many ways lightyears ahead of Linux. What do you mean with 'world
class kernel'?

~~~
zbowling
Drivers, scheduler, and missing things I could get from things like procfs in
Linux that doesn't have an equivalent. I have a had a few issues with GL on
QNX as well. It's pretty amazing but not nearly as rigorously tested.

------
wallflower
3 years ago, an ex-RIM engineer posted on a well-known Internet forum called
ShackNews about his insider perspective. It was immediately deleted by him -
but not before making the rounds of the tech blogs (in excerpts).

The money quote is that RIM thought the iPhone was impossible... It was not
just beyond business scope - it was beyond their worldview.

"You guys could have avoided this entire conversation by just defining what
Apple created as something more than a smartphone. What we call a smartphone
today is a rather different than what was meant when the term was first
coined.

The first smartphone was pretty much the Nokia Communicator back in the late
90s. It had data connectivity and some limited ability to run applications,
and that pretty much what a smartphone was at the time. Today we take it to
mean handheld wireless computer that happens to have a phone, but back then if
you send a few packets you were a smartphone.

I was hired by RIM in 1999 just before they began work on their first phone
and spent a good number years writing RIM proprietary protocol stacks that
layered on top of the then new GPRS. Coming from a two-way pager background,
RIM decided that phones should have two-way push synchronization of pretty
much everything that Exchange provided along with a limited WML browser. The
general thought was that phones would never have sufficient power density or
radios sufficient bandwidth to allow anything more. That was incredibly
predictably wrong, but it's how things went down.

Along with RIM was Ericsson, Palm, Motorola, and Qualcomm. Motorola came from
a similar background as RIM and went on to build very similar devices. Both
Nokia and Ericsson had come from phones and had decided feature phones should
have far more sophisticated PDA functions. Palm started with PDAs then moved
to the phones, but adamantly dismissed ideas like wireless synchronization for
years making their first attempts at smart phone far more like early Nokia
Communicators than early Blackberrys. Oddly enough, though Nokia made the
first smartphone, which was followed by two more with RIM and arguably Palm in
20002, it was Ericsson that popularly coined the term in the mid 2000s.

So the point is that all these companies were fighting over what amounts to
overgrown PDAs with phones and wireless stacks strapped on. Everyone assumed
power density was no where even close to what was needed for general
computing, that a full featured browser and heavy duty Internet services were
impossible due to bandwidth and latency. Take a look at how our Java expert
groups named standards, how people at the time talked about what features
smart phones should have, and its clear that no one thought an iPhone was
possible. Even Danger, which eventually went on to work on to create Windows
Phone 7 and Android, was just working on a better Blackberry.

The iPhone did many amazing things, but what stands out in my mind was how it
proved that these assumptions were flat-out wrong beyond any reasonable doubt.
Apple pretty gave everyone the finger and said, "Fuck you guys we can build
your distant impossible future today."

I left RIM back in 2006 just months before the IPhone launched and I remember
talking to friends from RIM and Microsoft about what their teams thought about
it at the time. Everyone was utterly shocked. RIM was even in denial the day
after the iPhone was announced with all hands meets claiming all manner of
weird things about iPhone: it couldn't do what they were demonstrating without
an insanely power hungry processor, it must have terrible battery life, etc.
Imagine their surprise when they disassembled an iPhone for the first time and
found that the phone was battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it. It
was ridiculous, it was brilliant.

I really don't think you're giving Apple enough credit here.

They did something amazing that many very prominent people in the industry
thought was either impossible or at least a decade away, and they did it in a
disgustingly short time frame."

Via
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2044389](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2044389)

~~~
josh2600
I'm a bit of a phone nerd and was working at AT&T/Cingular when the iPhone
dropped.

There were a combination of social and political forces that made the phone a
success beyond its obvious technical prowess. Many people don't know this, but
Apple had originally negotiated for a monthly residual fee from AT&T for each
iPhone and Apple negotiated their own custom activation scheme.

For those of you not familiar with carrier land, this was the first time in
the history of wireless networks something like this happened. Seriously, it
was unheard of; Apple dictating terms to AT&T. Think of the ridiculousness of
the situation; at the time AT&T is roughly 2x the size of Apple and gave the
keys to the kingdom away. It's akin to IBM with Windows and DOS, which was
again political and not technical.

The iPhone was a Trojan horse. The App Store opened up the carrier markets to
apps. Do you know how apps got on phones before the App Store? Pre-loading:
the ultra political game of getting manufacturers and power brokers within
operators to load your application in the factory. That was basically the only
way you'd hit a significant number of users, and even then you were probably
buried under 4 levels of menus.

Apple blew that world apart, which was, again, political and not technical.
Tons of other companies launched App stores before Apple but Apple executed.

These kinds of massive upheavals in the world don't happen with just
technology. There's a tremendous amount of social and political capital
required to make something like this work (and frankly some cajones and some
luck).

What we saw from Apple was a perfect orchestration of technology, art and the
body politic. It's the kind of thing you're lucky to see once in a generation,
IMHO.

Edit: Before the iPhone we never had a single person camp out for a phone. On
iPhone launch, we closed the store at 3pm to reopen for launch at 4, but
people had already been lining up the day before O_O. It's hard to overstate
what a shock this was to us. It had never happened before.

It would blow your mind if you knew what people were willing to do to get
iPhones. The things I've seen; it's more like an intoxicant than a phone, but
it is a great phone, isn't it? It's so hard to categorize the iPhone.

Edit 2: I knew that Blackberry was dead the day my friend walked into my
office and demoed an SSH client on his iPhone for managing his servers
remotely. Of course, his phone was jailbroken to do this, but nobody even
wanted to jailbreak a blackberry. The iPhone is a computer and blackberry was
a killer email experience with a phone stapled on.

~~~
slantyyz
>> Do you know how apps got on phones before the App Store?

Umm, yeah, I do. Handango and manual sync.

While Handango wasn't as frictionless as the App stores are today, it was
popular, multiplatform and had a pretty good selection.

~~~
wallflower
As a counterpoint, before the iPhone came out, it was standard practice to
wipe the PDA Phone (usually Windows Mobile) when doing a software upgrade. Can
you imagine the average consumer dealing with this engineer-designed nonsense?
My boss at the time was persuaded to try a Windows Mobile phone by a very
adamant - she lasted a month.

Google search for "Caution: Installing this update will delete all the
information on your PDA Phone."

Contrast this with OTA upgrades of iOS 7 and 30% adoption within 24 hours and
the Android 4.2 OTA upgrades (global adoption rate obviously lower) ...

~~~
slantyyz
> As a counterpoint, before the iPhone came out, it was standard practice to
> wipe the PDA Phone (usually Windows Mobile) when doing a software upgrade.

While you make a valid point of the state of OS upgrades at that time, I'm not
sure this is a counterpoint to where and how people got apps.

~~~
wallflower
I agree. More of a parallel - getting apps now is on device OTA - before it
required a tether to a desktop. Pure mobile is cloud + identity + device.

~~~
slantyyz
Funny thing - I still buy all my mobile apps from iTunes and Google Play on
the desktop. Old habits die hard.

------
seunosewa
It's not clear that there's anything at all that they could have done
differently that would have made them successful. Releasing BBM on multiple
platforms earlier would not have made very much money. Completing BB10 earlier
would not have caused it to beat IOS, Android, or Windows Phone. The Playbook
would still have failed to iPads, Android tablets, and Window 8 tablets if it
was designed as a standalone product. I think they were just doomed, really.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Sell high-end android handsets with blackberry apps and designs that are
optimized for business use. Concentrate on other sorts of tooling beyond just
email and IM in the mobile business space. Or one of a hundred other ideas
that are more sound that what they actually did.

RIM innovated once and then stopped, but the world kept changing and passed
them by.

~~~
glesica
Actually an Android handset with some really solid, secure apps and no
consumer cruft (copy of some movie you can't delete, Blockbuster app, etc.)
would have been pretty killer back when I had a Blackberry through work.

------
auctiontheory
The problem with this article is that you could write about similar infighting
and bureaucracy and failed initiatives at the most successful companies, not
just the failures. It doesn't identify or explain what was essentially
different about the BlackBerry situation.

(I don't have the answer. Maybe it's just randomness.)

~~~
flatfilefan
My take is that they could not manage the team growth that was supposed to
support their business growth. When team was relatively small they could
execute well. After they grew and had to hire just to fill those new positions
random people dragged them down. The quality of late BB OS6 and 7 was awful
compared to the 5th. This all happened when they were making good sales and
were still growing.

~~~
auctiontheory
Okay, then the question becomes: how or why was their HR/recruiting worse than
at Apple or Google?

~~~
flatfilefan
Harder to get (new) top people into Canada? Or just because their HR was plain
worse?

------
socrates1998
I never liked the keyboard, but for a while, it was the best thing around.

Blackberry was dead when they didn't recognize the iPhone's impact.

They could have easily have developed something to compete with it, while
still having the keyboard line of products.

They scoffed at the iPhone, then ignored Android. Now they are paying for it.

Pride comes before the fall.

------
lnanek2
I remember talking to a finance girl in NYC and she the only real options were
BB or iPhone. BB because it was the most serious, you could type the fastest,
iPhone was allowed though. I've seen lots of people in politics, running
political campaigns texting canvassers constantly, etc. also love the BB. Well
BB tried to switch to being the iPhone and it didn't work. Only reason Android
succeeded at copying iPhone is that it is often cheaper and goes through
faster hardware iterations through many OEMs so often has better hardware to
boot.

~~~
Spooky23
Political people love Blackberries because a BB within a BES community is both
secure and makes it easy to obfuscate accountability. You could rotate devices
in such a way that you can compartmentalize who can communicate in writing by
moving phones around. You can also shut people out by not giving them the list
of device PINs for important people.

If you've ever worked at a place where the execs frequently "lost"
BlackBerries, they were up to something.

------
rbanffy
"smartphone inventor"... Journalists these days can't even do basic
research...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon)

------
bsg75
This is almost painful to read - rushed, still late, yet, broken. Quick and
dirty is not always quick, but its often dirty:

"The product was the BlackBerry Storm. It was the most complex and ambitious
project the company had ever done, but “the technology was cobbled together
quickly and wasn’t quite ready,” said one former senior company insider who
was involved in the project."

"The product was months late, hitting the market just before U.S. Thanksgiving
in 2008. Many customers hated it. The touchscreen, RIM’s first, was awkward to
manipulate. The product ran on a single processor and was slow and buggy."

------
kaoD
> The plan was to push wireless carriers to adopt RIM’s popular BlackBerry
> Messenger (BBM) instant messaging service as a replacement for their short
> text messaging system (SMS) applications – no matter what kind of phone
> their customers used.

I doubt that would've saved Blackberry or even that they could've pulled it
off. How could they convince (extort) carriers? Banning non-compliant carriers
from selling Blackberry? Good luck with that (especially with other phone
manufacturers pushing too).

------
brudgers
I love having a physical keyboard on my phone. I wish someone made one phone
sized and with Bluetooth.

