Big pet peeve. Blackberry was 3rd at best. Palm and WindowsCE both had phones on the market before Blackberry's first phone in 2002.
BB fell for one very simple reason. They treated devs as the enemy. They had a really horrible attitude towards people who wanted to code for them. J2ME was a dog to use and everything pointed devs to use EMACS. WindowsCE and Palm had amazing teams of devs helping. They both had great IDE's.
To write a line of code for the BB cost the dev real money, where IOS and Palm only took a cut as you launched. This let devs get to feel out things.
With that limitation, there were only a small number of devs willing to learn. So if a company had to choose between building for BB or IOS or WinCE they picked what devs they could hire.
Now.. having met the BB team when they were still making beepers, I can also attributed the fall to arrogance. I personally asked the founders about how they treated the dev community, (while at a trade show) and they said. "People will learn how to write our way."
Devs were second class, and that IMHO cost them the world
Are you referring to emacs, the editor? It seems a bit odd to me that that single issue would be so important, especially considering that Emacs is actually a very nice editor that many of us use today. I actually know quite a lot of people, myself included, who switched Emacs just so they could use a particular language.
Big pet peeve. Blackberry was 3rd at best. Palm and WindowsCE both had phones on the market before Blackberry's first phone in 2002.
BB fell for one very simple reason. They treated devs as the enemy. They had a really horrible attitude towards people who wanted to code for them. J2ME was a dog to use and everything pointed devs to use EMACS. WindowsCE and Palm had amazing teams of devs helping. They both had great IDE's.
To write a line of code for the BB cost the dev real money, where IOS and Palm only took a cut as you launched. This let devs get to feel out things.
With that limitation, there were only a small number of devs willing to learn. So if a company had to choose between building for BB or IOS or WinCE they picked what devs they could hire.
Now.. having met the BB team when they were still making beepers, I can also attributed the fall to arrogance. I personally asked the founders about how they treated the dev community, (while at a trade show) and they said. "People will learn how to write our way."
Devs were second class, and that IMHO cost them the world