Blackberry came into the market as a mobile email tool, and only grudgingly moved into phone functions… and failed completely to see the broader smartphone evolution.
They’re just another in a long, long list of “total market pwners” who were first up against the wall when the revolution came… and were surprised to find themselves there, because of smugness and inattention to what the market was saying.
CP/M, WordStar, WordPerfect, Palm, BlackBerry… just a few highlights of their peers.
We heard you the first time. 
Now that I think about it, though, this might be a meditation on RIM - giving the same thing, over and over again, to consumers that had moved on to the next thing. The market changed, they didn’t - it’s done in many more companies than RIM.
It’s not just Blackberry, everyone who built a phone pre-iPhone is in trouble. Nokia abandoned their Symbian platform to go all in on Windows 7/8 with dubious results. Palm tried and failed to build the Pre and got sold to HP before finally being killed off. Microsoft waited years with their aging Windows 6.5 platform before going through a gut wrenching transition to Windows 7. And RIM is pinning all their hopes on their new QNX platform which isn’t getting much enthusiasm.
The problem was existing phone manufacturers were beholden to their legacy platforms and all of the decades old assumptions which now didn’t apply in this new market. Only iOS and Android had the luxury of starting from scratch.
I don’t know how one would find hard stats on hackability, but in order of most to least hackable the list goes:
I think it went beyond “missing the vision”. RIM had suppliers, production lines, manufacturing, and software development all set up for the kind of product they were already making. Touchscreen-type phones are in a lot of ways completely different technology requiring a lot of components that RIM had no personal or institutional expertise in. They really couldn’t have switched over to making iphone-like devices right away without doing a massive overhaul of their business.
I doubt that RIM had a huge investment in factories, tooling, specific training etc. Had they come up with a viable and market-accepted touchscreen phone, some variant of Foxconn would have stood ready to turn it out. I think you’re right in that they were wedded to their view of what a small handheld communications gadget ‘was’ and failed change their view in time to stay atop the wave.
Samsung, and LG were all making phones prior to iPhone and are still doing well, so it isn’t every pre-iPhone phone maker.
What’s notable about RIM, Nokia, and Palm is by and large while they had a other very minor products their mobile phone business was the core of their business. So if their phones became unpopular, they were doomed. Samsung/LG were going concerns before cell phones were invented (as was Nokia, but they got out of their old businesses) and mostly still made a lot of money off their other business units throughout so even if their phones sucked and weren’t selling the companies themselves would have survived.
Motorola is sort of a mixture of RIM and Microsoft. Like Microsoft, Motorola’s cell phone division was not doing well, and like Microsoft Motorola still made a lot of money off of other things. Unlike Microsoft, however, the phone thing was a big part of Motorola and they couldn’t easily survive when that division started doing poorly. It became a drag on the more consistent revenue streams Motorola made off of its other products (they make a lot of wireless equipment, cellular base stations etc), so Motorola had a lot of great revenue but a growing liability of a handset unit. So in the end it split into two companies and the handset business was sold off, then being bought up by Google.
Technically, the handset business was spun off, then bought by Google.
-D/a
Smartphones are fairly-to-very expensive - I’m not so sure that they are catering to that market. Low-end Blackberry devices seem popular with teens in the UK though - I think because of BBM.
Yeah, my impression was similar - I figured that RIM was marketing to companies, who would provide Blackberries to executives - therefore, they designed something to appeal to IT departments. When the technology got cheaper, they had to compete with firms that could sell to individuals - a much different market that they had no experience with.
Oops, I was referring to people who built cellphone software, not cellphone hardware.
You folks might be interested in this.
In 2007, when Apple introduced the iPhone, RIM thought that it was impossible!
Oh yeah, shit, what happened? Sorry.
Pretty much what everyone has been saying.
I just refer to it as Social Darwinism.
They didn’t adapt fast enough. Whether it was a matter of couldn’t or wouldn’t is pretty much moot at this point.
Personal opinion: they, like Nokia and Kodak, had a good thing going, became complacent and didn’t see the market changing, by the time they noticed, they couldn’t catch up.
In the USA, smartphones are subsidized by the cell phone providers as long as you commit to a 2 year contract. Looking at Verizon (one of the largest providers), the absolute most expensive Android phones are $300, most expensive iPhone is $200. If you’re willing to take a step back to a 6 month old model, you’re in the $100 range. Probably within the reach of most teens.
It didn’t help that to work with Microsoft Exchange, which is the biggest business email platform, you had to have a Blackberry Enterprise Server with its added licensing and costs. Exchange 2003 started the trend towards Activesync and Exchange 2007 solidified it. So instead of being required to have an extra server connect to Exchange to send email to a mobile user, the Exchange server could do it directly. That’s the biggest failing to me.
If I compare the number of times we’ve had troubles with BES compared to having problems with Activesync, it’s not even close. I can think of one Activesync outage that required any work, and that was a firewall issue. Compared to the amount of times we’ve had to call RIM for BES issues. If I could ban them from my company tomorrow, I would.
I remember a large screen, iPhone-like Blackberry device with no physical keyboard came out in .. oh, 2008 or 2009. It flopped. My guess; it wasn’t seen as a “serious” Blackberry by the corporate/business-types that embraced Blackberry at the time, and Blackberrry’s reputation as catering to the suit-and-tie crowd dissuaded consumers from considering it.
Nailed it. If anything, I remember the promotion for this item (the Storm?) as being something like Lehman Brothers trying to sell surfboards. Plastic surfboards in junior sizes.
I also heard that it wasn’t a very reliable piece of equipment. It had a lot of problems.
After the iPhone, the Blackberry was so limited… It’s death was already in sight. Sort of like the pager was doomed with cellphone technology.