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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

Here's how Blackberry could beat Apple, along with why it won't happen. Blackberry could just take a look at what Apple is doing, and do all of the same things, then do certain key things better. From a sheer resources and capability standpoint, Blackberry could beat the pants off of Apple. I think Apple is counting on: 1) Blackberry and other big phone makers being too set in their ways and 2) GM and other big phone makers getting some key things very, very wrong. Security is probably a key example. It's an oft-cited insurgency move to use the big power's culture against itself.

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To be fair, Blackberry (RIM) was not bigger than Apple on the day of the iPhone announcement. Also, RIM was kind of forced to build something like the iPhone by Verizon according to Losing the Signal by Jacquie McNish https://smile.amazon.com/Losing-Signal-Extraordinary-Spectac...

To be honest, there is some truth in the ideas behind the point though. RIM always liked to control everything, and at most give Enterprises control, but not end users. Apple targeted consumers, and relied on consumers to push into enterprise for them. IIRC, it was actually some time before iOS even supported basic enterprise features (like company control and reset for company devices, etc).

Yeah, I can see that, but GM and Tesla are so different in size that the comparison is a bit problematic.

RIM knew who their market was, and frankly should have been fine if there hadn't been a hype panic. Heck, their top market cap was a year after the iPhone.

I cannot help but think of a world where there was an actual "consumer" Blackberry device. I think the Bold form factor with the Passport keyboard UI and advances would have been a pretty nice machine. It was even thick enough for a really good camera and battery. I can even see the shooting video commercial tag line "Live Life in Widescreen" with snark about vertical video.

> Yeah, I can see that, but GM and Tesla are so different in size that the comparison is a bit problematic.

Sure, that's why I said the truth was in the ideas, not the statement itself. :)

> Heck, their top market cap was a year after the iPhone.

Sure, Apple added exchange support in early-to-mid 2008[1]. Add to that incomplete coverage of features initially, and the fact that Enterprises don't move as quickly as consumers, and it makes sense. I remember there being some hope RIM could pull off a good touch phone, but it was too later (I judge this by the fact that when they finally delivered a touch phone nobody really cared enough to give it the time of day).

1: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2537517/apple-mac/apple...

They flopped around trying to bolt touch features into their shitty legacy OS.

Then they rolled out a really good OS (bought QNX) but it took too long and delivered too late. By most reviews it was a quality product, but 3 years too late.

They should have bought Palm in 2010 when it was up for sale and built on their existing product.

But they bought QNX that year instead, and released their mediocre tablet a bit year later. Anybody who saw how flubbed that was could see the writing on the wall.

When I worked at a mobile gaming company, we joked about how terrible it was, pretty sure I saw one getting kicked around the office.

I'm not sure what point this find/replace is supposed to be making. That seems like a pretty accurate assessment of how Blackberry could have beaten Apple and why they didn't. Well, except it also needs a find/replace on "security" to something else like "UI."

I think the point is that anybody is theoretically capable of beating anybody else if you assume they can do a clearly better job in all respects. You could replace "GM" with any other entity without making it more or less true, because the statement is so firmly rooted outside of reality.

If there's a practical path to GM doing the same things Tesla is doing that's in line with GM's observed practices and capabilities, that would be much more interesting — but the fact that Bizarro World GM could beat Earth-1 Tesla doesn't tell us much of anything.

I'm not sure what Apple has to do with it exactly, but I thought he was talking about the fact that BlackBerry owns QNX and is marketing it as a vehicle software platform.

The point is GM won't beat Tesla, for similar reasons to why BB and Nokia didn't beat Apple, despite having a number of advantages.

GM is already "beating" Tesla by shipping an actual high quality regular-consumer EV product this year right now that is getting stellar reviews.

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