Hacker News Reader

Comment by batbomb | Hacker News Reader

I’d be afraid of Google if I had worked at Blackberry too, just look at the destruction they did.

Eh, I think blackberry's destruction was of their own making. They had a huge head start but failed to embrace apps. The onboarding process for developers was painful and their devices were chronically underpowered.

They failed to read the winds of change that saw Bring Your Own Device come to the workplace and thought they were safe with enterprise and government users.

>The onboarding process for developers was painful and their devices were chronically underpowered.

I can resonate with this. I worked for a major bank developing their blackberry app. It was amazingly painful to develop on their platform, its a literal mess.

Android wasn't that great technically at the time either, I was actively avoiding mobile app development at that time due to how crappy the SDK was, thankfully it's not that bad anymore, Google put a lot of work on Android since then but was Blackberry really worse?

It was night and day. Imagine Android dev with worse documentation in Java 5, (somehow!) more fragmentation, less hype so less stack overflow articles but with stricter than Apple submission hoops and no xcode to help you stumble through it.

Looking back, I’m more and more convinced it was Verizon’s need for an iPhone clone that killed them. The book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry goes into a lot of detail about their decisions and that looked like the big problem. Something like the Passport earlier would have been a better bet than any Storm model.

Their developer tools were laughably painful in the iPhone age.

Jim Balsillie actually tried to change course, open up, and monetize BBM. He was shot down hard by the rest of the board, who thought hardware was the way to go. I can't imagine how much that would sting, considering a couple years later Whatsapp would be sold for billions. Taken from the book mentioned in the article actually, Losing the Signal, before anyone asks for a source.

I was an avid bbm user and when they brought in the monetization changes I quickly grew to detest the app.

If that was his vision at work, then I'm not surprised it failed. Monetized bbm was/is a spammy, irritating mess.

There's only two possible ways to survive in the commodity phone hardware world:

a) Price dumping and giving out a free OS to Chinese OEM's.

b) Making a "luxury" product to differentiate against Chinese OEM's.

Neither of these two paths was open to Blackberry. Sorry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com