

Ex-BlackBerry Co-CEO Talks Publicly - graeham
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CN_TEC_BLACKBERRY_FAILURE?SITE=AP

======
jfb
RIM was a super-efficient machine for selling a story to CTOs, and that story
required a device for people to carry around. That market is insignificantly
small in comparison to the larger market of human beings; when Apple started
selling to humans, there was one thing RIM could've done: blow their entire
company apart and sell the same service without the handsets, by bringing the
features that CTOs wanted from the Blackberry ecosystem to the world of BYOD.

But that amount of change would have been suicidal for a lot of management,
and would require changing the entire company on a relative dime. It's hardly
surprising that they tried to muddle through and got crushed.

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MattyMc
I was at this event. It was hosted at the Empire Club of Canada in Toronto and
featured the two authors of Losing The Signal: The Spectacular Rise and fall
of Blackberry, interview Jim Balsillie. Jim was excellent; gracious, humble,
insightful, kind. These were my big takeaways (very loosely quoted):

On hiring: Q. How did you attract talent to the small city of Waterloo? Jim:
We found kids that were excited to come to the BIG city of Waterloo. Small
town Valedictions. I love hiring them. Give them two years to mature and
they'll knock your socks off.

On the iPhone début: Jim: Perhaps overlooked was the significance of having
the exclusive deal with ATT. Steve Jobs used to describe the carriers as the
"four orifices" \- everything had to go through them. This partnership was far
more significant than people realized.

On Blackberry: Q. What phone do you have in your pocket? Jim: I have a
Blackberry, I read my newspaper every morning on a Blackberry Playbook. I love
them both, and you'll have to pry them out of my cold dead hands if you want
me to change!

A few things I wasn't aware of (from Jim): \- In it's heyday, RIM (Blackberry)
was the fastest growing company 5 years in a row. \- There was a patent battle
that nearly killed RIM (Blackberry) in it's early days, before they major
growth (I would like to read more on this).

Great session.

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mfoy_
I personally hold that RIM failed because it ignored it's winning demographic
(government, military, enterprise and business users) and attempted to create
a device for the broader consumer market.

The Storm was rushed out, as the article says, in part because RIM thought it
had to compete where I don't think it had to compete. Now I'm no savvy
analyst, but it seems to me like RIM got tricked into picking a fight on
Apple's terms and lost terribly.

~~~
devopsproject
No, RIM failed because government, military, enterprise, and business users
are also normal consumers when not working. Sure, they had great messaging,
but apple and google had decent messaging with web browsers, games, and
applications

~~~
raverbashing
Exactly this

The reason MS made sure you could Windows at home "for free" is that it would
carry to the business world (where the money is).

I find it very hard to remember something that went from business to the home
market successfully.

Nobody wants their clunky office app/device to be used at home, what they want
is to use their consumer app/device on the office which is usually better and
easier to use.

~~~
stephengillie
> I find it very hard to remember something that went from business to the
> home market successfully.

The Personal Computer.

Remember that mainframe you have at work that can crunch right thru
spreadsheet numbers? Now you can have that same convenience at home. And this
one can play Frogger too.

~~~
raverbashing
A Personal Computer (which started with the Apple I/II and after that to work,
with IBM) is different from a Mainframe

~~~
stephengillie
Yeah, it's a personal mainframe. That's how they were marketed - it does the
same things, but it's small enough to have in your home.

------
emp
If RIM's developer tools now are an indication of what they were like back
when Apple released XCode for iOS, I am not surprised how things turned out. I
had to do the tiniest of an app as a starting point for someone else recently.
Horrible IDE, compile errors in sample code that mysteriously go away if you
mash "run" a few times, need to install support components but what exactly
isn't defined, documents where you aren't sure right away what version of
BlackBerry they are for. And when you find the docs, you find the writer is in
love with acronyms. I decided very quickly I would never touch the platform
seriously, there is no joy there. Also, if Objective-C is deemed 'too hard',
what is C++ + Qt considered?

It's as if RIM consists of hard core business people and hard core engineers,
both wearing blinders while cheering each other on. There are no 'normals' to
care about how one feels about developing on the platform, to care about
initial experiences, documentation that doesn't frustrate. If it's like this
at the developer level, who is there is care about the end user? If I was a
developer on BlackBerry back then, I would have jumped on the iOS opportunity.
Today, you can't even pay previous BB developers to work on BB, they have
moved on and want to enjoy their work. The few sticking it out know they can
charge pretty much whatever rate they want. A smart phone without apps is a
dumb phone.

------
colinbartlett
Did I miss something or is that "article" two paragraphs with a single quote
which amounts to “With Storm we tried to do too much."?

~~~
fcp
This article makes a much better read:

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-the-rise-and-fall-of-
blac...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-the-rise-and-fall-of-
blackberry-1432311912)

A link to get around the paywall:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Inside+Story+of+How+the+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Inside+Story+of+How+the+iPhone+Crippled+BlackBerry&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari)

------
BinaryIdiot
BYOD has always been a huge thing but until the iPhone it was hard to justify
because many phones simply contained your personal phone numbers and MAYBE
email with no good way to keep company stuff separate (Windows Mobile was
really the only one that did this...kinda).

When the iPhone came out it showed how more personal a phone could be; of
course everyone is going to want to keep their personal assistant with them
all the time!

Many seem to think RIM competing in the consumer market was a bad choice but I
argue that no matter what direction BlackBerry went after the iPhone's release
they had no choice but to compete in the consumer market. Nowadays there are
plenty of holdouts but it's getting difficult to find a place where you can't
use your personal phone and have your work stuff on it but separated.

------
hauget
Here's how I think they failed:

1) They should have embraced a decent appstore and given developers the proper
tools to not just build great apps, but also make money (same thing happened
to Nokia)

2) Yes, they rushed production of the Storm. They should have NOT tried to
make BB OS more iPhone/Android like and focused more on #1

BB hardware, security and power efficiency is where BB is king. I really wish
RIM would disappear and merge with Windows Phone. Nokia/BB HW + WinOS/Android
would be a killer combination.

------
serve_yay
In a Dunkin Donuts, I once saw two strangers (strangers to each other)
commiserating about the problems they were having with their Blackberry Storms
and how much they both hated it and wished they had gotten iPhones. I wish I
could say it was a revelation but I feel that the writing was on the wall as
soon as the iPhone was announced.

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lewisl9029
I still wonder if their handset business could have survived if they had
swallowed their pride and became just another Android vendor.

Their hardware was at the very least competitive with the rest of the market,
and I believe they would still have great appeal to the niche of users that
prefer physical keyboards today.

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headgasket
no wifi. Simple, very simple, bad business decision, to pander to the
carriers.

By simply adding the HW and disabling by default they would have appealed to
geeks and devs; instead in 2006 we were importing at top dollars grey market
nokia e61s from europe. (canadian dev here)

Because the local carriers were offering a variant of those phones without the
wifi here.

Iphone with wifi was the paradigm shift, carriers are still reeling from this
one.

------
devopsproject
At the store, I thought the clickable screen was "neat" but would probably
become annoying after a few days. 100% return rate confirms this. RIM had to
know it was going to fail.

------
shyn3
Who has a BlackBerry 10 device? _Not an attempt at sarcasm_

~~~
alphadevx
I do, love it. But according to many on this thread (and others), RIM "failed"
and were "crushed" etc., so I guess I didn't get the memo...

------
Zenst
Problems were they ignored Apple and at a time in which they themselfs were
moving more towards the consumer market with the perl and Bold models,
dropping the nice easy to use jog-wheel which still can't be beat for
scrolling up and down fast with one hand, imho.

They then got complacent upon the business side and then ended up going in a
panic as they used the share price as a indicator and not feedback of how
things were going and with that had extra delays in seeing what was wrong.

They also had some nice wifi VOIP features but telco's prevented those from
coming live in 2007 and would of helped greatly for business and consumer side
at a time in which hotspots and wifi was becoming fruitful.

This alienating of business users and many missed opportunities, for one being
rolling there own datacentre box instead of an expensive bolt-on for microsoft
Exchange would of opened up other non Exchange based markets more and also
given a firmer presence and toe-hold in a company.

Sad part was I was working there upto 2007 and had chatted with a director
(late 2006) about the alienating the business market chasing the consumer one
and we know how that went. But still pains me how the management were more
into being seen to be good than actually being good and with that was two
types, those who were technical and those who were not and the latter sadly
had more say and less ears.

Then the other big aspect that hit Blackberry would be 3G, on 2G they beat
everything with their own data protocol optimised for low-usage and needing
telco's to have there own server to handle the custom UDP packets, which upon
a device you would find under the books, which was there teminology for
protocol handler/translation upon the device. Now when 3G started the whole
pulling emails become more easier, less need for high cost 2G usage, and
whilst 3G not as cheap it allowed more saturation very quickly to reduce those
costs and mature at a time just right for Apple in many parts as well as
others.

Another avenue they had was blackberry connect which would run upon other
devices (windows phones, nokia's and the like) which would handle the
blackberry custome protocol to allow emails using as little 2G data as
possible, this whole area was one they did not invest in and started cutting
back at a time when things were about to change. Again more aggressive deals
and less arrogance about position in the market would of done huge favours and
they could of been the go to email provider of Apple and the World, but they
did not.

It is if almost they went thru a phase of picking the bad decisions at the
worst time and hd they rolled dice would of had better luck in direction.

Still, to admit failure is good for a CEO, albeit few many years late. But Jim
was one of the better ones, managment wise.

~~~
flinty
>They then got complacent upon the business side and then ended up going in a
panic as they used the share price as a indicator and not feedback of how
things were going and with that had extra delays in seeing what was wrong.

What does share price as an indicator and not feedback mean?

~~~
Zenst
Means people would tell managment things were wrong and they would ignore it
as the share price was doing well. So instead of using metrics to gauge how
well they did they were in effect ignoring those and going the share price is
alright, have another beer.

------
Someone1234
That's just blog spam of the AP piece which itself is pretty short. There's
really no new insights here, just "the Storm was rushed, it failed, so we gave
up." That's the entire content of the original article, a single short quote.

~~~
dang
Ok, we changed the URL to that from [http://time.com/3916434/blackberry-
storm/](http://time.com/3916434/blackberry-storm/).

~~~
ars
Change the URL again to this:
[http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CN_TEC_BLACKBERRY_FAI...](http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CN_TEC_BLACKBERRY_FAILURE?SITE=AP)

The current URL makes you pick your city, etc, first.

~~~
dang
Ok, sure. Does it work now?

~~~
ars
Looks good to me.

------
graeham
Whoever changed the link to the AP article, it is now broken...

~~~
stephengillie
[http://time.com/3916434/blackberry-
storm/](http://time.com/3916434/blackberry-storm/).

