What did Blackberry do wrong?

Used to have a Blackberry (my company supported them) but I switched over to a Droid recently, and as I understand the situation, Blackberry–once the gold standard in cel phones–now has basically destroyed itself, holding an increasingly lower and lower market share.

What happened? Bad technology? Bad business model? Some foolish decision at one point? Bad marketing? Bad luck?

I’ve always had the impression that Blackberry held on too long to the idea that business professionals wouldn’t trust or be interested in smart phones. They were late realizing that smart phones made good business tools as well as personal entertainment devices, and that the business community would be willing to shift in that direction. By the time they caught on, it was too late (particularly given the success of the iPhone). Again, just my personal thoughts.

Also, when I saw this thread title, I thought the user Blackberry had been banned.

Apple changed the paradigm with the iPhone, and Blackberry was slow to react.

Quit picking on me :frowning:

Stuck to the small screen/physical keyboard for too long.

Weirdly, the only time I ever saw Blackberries here were when owned by foreigners. They had next to zero market penetration in Sweden.

Sounds like someone is feeling guilty…

I live in Waterloo (home of RIM) and looking in from the outside it appears they got fat and lazy.

One of the reasons it was slow to react was RIM had a lot of managers, included the two founders as co-CEOs. They hired too many people when they were making money hand over fist and never really questioned if the staff were adding value.

Blackberry sucked at everything except for receiving phone calls and reading email. Phones evolved past what BB was willing to do.

RIM was promoting quality in a market that wanted low prices and gimmickry. They also banked on some exclusivity in the market through patents that didn’t pan out well for them. But basically they fell into an old trap, the idea that businesses wouldn’t use consumer products.

Quality? Like their multiple rolling service blackouts, or the utter inability of RIM phones to come even close to the ease of use of nearly any other smartphone on the market?

You’re looking a little blue.

That’s what they were promoting. I’m not endorsing their claims.

The company has been horribly mismanaged. E.g., they released the Playbook without an email app. And that wasn’t the only rollout they screwed up.

Slashdot regularly reports on these screwups. Here’s one that involved Blackberry employees begging management to turn things around.

Speaking of the Playbook.

If you look around, you see stuff from the CEO and others blaming all sorts of outside things for their failures. People laugh at these explanations. If you are in denial about your problems, they aren’t going to get fixed. The company is doomed. Others will swoop in for patents and such at some point, but that’s the best case scenario.

It is hard to think of anything RIM has done RIGHT in the past five years. It is horribly managed, works on a closed platform, and the hardware downright sucks. It is only still on life support because fucktard corporate IT departments are even less innovative than RIM.

Now you guys are just being mean. I’m good at a lot of things.

I don’t think that’s entirely a result of excessive hiring. Companies tend to get top-heavy as they decline since the higher up you are, the more stake you have in the company and the more reluctant you are to leave, and higher-ups are more loathe to let you go because of the institutional knowledge you possess.

I think touch screens did them in. The smartphone world moved to touch screens, which RIM had no experience in. It was easy for Apple and Droid to handle because they entered the market with those hardware lines already in place, but RIM’s processes had a lot more inertia to overcome, and they didn’t.

Oh, RIM was top-heavy before the decline.

Buy you’re quite right that RIM missed the boat on the whole touch screen thing. There were people at RIM trying to push for going touch screen on at least a few product lines (I talked to more than one), but no one at the top was listening. I honestly think that management was so hyper-focused on the big business market that they completely ignored what the retail consumer wanted.

It is hard to think of anything RIM has done RIGHT in the past five years. It is horribly managed, works on a closed platform, and the hardware downright sucks. It is only still on life support because fucktard corporate IT departments are even less innovative than RIM.

I’m quite happy with BB Torch.

In my opinion it is a pinnacle of what a phone should do design-wise – touch screen and sliding keyboard combined in a compact size, not too small and tiny and not too big.

I’ll admit iPhone IS shiny, looks cool, has cool apps but I’m not a teenager anymore so I couldn’t care less for that. And i don’t have a whole day to fiddle with it.

Smartphone market is in many ways similar to movie and music market – it’s largely driven by 12 to 19 year olds and you can sell a lot of crap to that crowd.

I’d be interested in stats on how hackable each platform is - iPhone vs. Android vs, BlackBerry.

More on the consumer side, it’s not always about function. A lot of the cases I’ve seen, companies started swapping to iPhone and Android because users had purchased one for personal use and liked it enough that they put pressure on their companies to move to those devices because they liked them more.

But, yeah, as others said, they were horribly mismanaged and they were just too slow to react to changing trends in the market. Slow to respond to touch screens, slow to start incorporating other functionality. And by not making the effort to break into the consumer market, there was little growth for them in that direction, while you had that large influx from the consumers to the business world.