What's really wrong with BlackBerry

> Killing OS 9 to start completely new in OS X

WWDC 2002: Steve Jobs presides over the funeral for 'The Death of Mac OS 9'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl7xQ8i3fc0

Cannibalization is not the norm. There are many successful platforms which didn't go the route of cannibalization. Ex - windows.

The OS 9 - OS 10 example is more of an exception than the norm. In the case of OS 9 everyone(even Apple people) knew it sucked big time. They tried hard for several years to fix it's problems or try to develop a new one. There was no way for them to continue with OS 9.

RIM isn't exactly is in such a bad situation. Agreed that they need to woo developers much much more to their platform but that doesn't warrant cannibalization. They should continue innovating but should be more evolutionary.

The bad thing is that for a long time RIM sat on it's laurels without much innovation. Good thing is that they still haven't lost the market share. They already moved from their strong place of qwerty keyboards to touch screens. Much more innovation is needed. Not just copying others but having a vision of the future and then aggressively executing on that vision. They did it once before which made Blackberry such a cracking brand. Now they should do it again.

For some reason RIM gets little but hate around this place (maybe because it doesn't make products for hackers and it competes with Apple), but I think their story is actually quite inspiring.

Mike Lizaridis quit engineering school a early to found RIM in 1984 in a tech backwater. He struggled for a decade, but slowly built up the company over a decade to around 100 people. They then hit a rough patch and had a tough round of layoffs, but survived. 15 years after they were founded, they hit upon both a brilliant idea and execution. When the BlackBerry was released in 1999, RIM had around 120 people and sold 25000 of the units. Over the last decade, they have managed to fend off all big tech companies while growing into a global brand a major tech company. Meanwhile, Mike L has funded one of the coolest charities around (Perimeter Institute) and RIM has turned Waterloo into a major tech center.

So, to answer your glib question: many times between 84 and 99, once around 2003 (replacing an old OS) and right now (with the move to QNX and webos-like SDK).

Why do you glorify doing something new and stupid, when doing good things well is what people really should be admiring. — Linus Torvalds

They haven't, but they are currently in the process of trying to reinvent their OS - with QNX. Except, they are launching this OS, but leaving all their Java devs behind. The OS launches on the Playbook with only C++ and Flash support if you can believe it. I don't expect them to have significant market share in two years from now.

About Apple killing classic MacOS, it was really kill or be killed. They did it years too late, IMHO.

I was actually pretty hopeful about RIM on the QNX and TAT acquisitions, but I am worried about the emphasis on AIR on the Playbook. I just don't see anyone reliant on a cross platform environment (more than a framework) as being able to get the most out of the unique features of their system. It also might not be a happy choice for their existing Java developers.

The main reason why Android is winning is because they were the first quality (iOS like) multi-manufacturer OS that was pushed by a big company that most people love and got a lot of momentum. I don't think being free or open-source was the main reason Android is succeed. It definitely plays a huge role, but even if Google charged a $10 license like Microsoft is doing now with WP7, Android would've still succeeded.

In this case it's actually WP7 that is more like Linux - opportunity wise - because WP7 is the one coming into the market after Android is well entrenched.

I think what has helped Android's uptake is that it's freely alterable without having to ask someone's permission.

Networks and handset manufacturers can use Android as a base and push whatever features they like without having an Apple or RIM complaining.

A major part of making it freely alterable is that the manufacturer/network can make it locked down to the end-user, even if Google doesn't mind people having root on their handset the networks hate it and the networks are the handset manufacturer's customers, not end-users.

I think that's why most comparisons to the desktop PC market break down for me: Dell and Apple's PC/Mac customers are almost always the end-user of their device (corporate sales excepted), so the driving force behind what goes into those products is very different. The network is the one paying the handset manufacturer, so phones are designed to meet the needs of the network.

Apple and RIM have done some good work to try and change this by taking ownership of the relationship with the end-user and reducing the network to a mere carrier of data. Android is pretty much the exact opposite: by being free it becomes 'free to suit the networks' and 'free to make it match network branding'.

That's not to say that Android is bad or otherwise technically lesser than BB or iOS, but I'm pretty certain that it's free availability was a huge factor in the uptake from multiple manufacturers.

The reason linux has never taken off on the desktop is the lock-in from MS propietary formats. There is no such lock in for mobile devices.

Windows was already established as the desktop OS standard before Linux became prominent. Windows had a huge base of apps and massive network effects. Saving money on the cost of the OS was not enough of an advantage to make most users switch away from Windows.

Mobile is very different. There is no single established OS standard, and in fact most phone buyers don't even know what the OS is in their phone (I am talking about average users, not the folks who are reading this comment). Cellphone companies will sweat blood in order to cut ten cents out of the parts cost of a phone. Eliminating ten dollars in cost is a huge deal to them.

Add to that the marketing power of the Google brand, and Android looked very attractive to mobile phone manufacturers when compared to Windows Mobile and Symbian, which were the other main choices at the time.

Being free is a big reason, in the same way that cheap OEM licenses are Windows' way of having the biggest market share. Free's not the killer, being cheap enough to be widely available is. Even if Macs or iPhones are the better product, Windows and Android both have nearly every hardware maker in the market selling it (and, in Android's case, on every network), making it a more convenient and marketable option.

AT&T being a crappy network is analogous to AutoCAD and games only being available on Windows; a way to leverage wide availability into concrete advantages for some segments, despite having a worse product to begin with.

I've no figures to back it up, but my initial thought is that the simple cost of the OS isn't the deciding factor. For a PC people expect the Windows name, to see Windows on it, and for all their Windows software to work. That leaves using Linux as an unseen cost to the supplier. For a phone most people probably don't see an OS (with the probable exception of Apple), and don't have legacy software. They just see a phone they want that does shiny things. Therefore the OS chosen might not have such a hidden cost making the fact that Android is free a bigger advantage.

Linux hasn't managed to take off because for most people it requires changing virtually every application they use to a different one.

OSX is able to make inroads because several key applications such as Microsoft Office, Adobe's products, iTunes etc. also work on Macs.

Mobile phones didn't really have 3rd party apps (they weren't popular) until they iPhone and people were switching brands pretty often anyway.

Windows vs. Mac is now Android vs. iPhone. Microsoft slacked off, and lost its place to the equally-ambitious Google. Desktop Linux never had a Google to push its adoption.

The "Android is free" bit is remarkably foolhardy, so it is surprising that it appears in so many articles.

I've heard that Microsoft charges somewhere in the range of $10 / unit for Windows Mobile, generally for an image that you quite literally set some flags and you have your gold copy (at least pre Windows Mobile 7, as my experience was with the CE variants). For Android the individual handset makers take on tremendous responsibility, not to mention that they often - for reasons of differentiation - decide to apply a generous layer of spakle on top. That doesn't come for free.

Android isn't and has never been free.

» How is that any kind of rebuttal?

A free competitor in the software world can have more users, but that doesn't necessarily mean your business is failing. Similarly, Apple has had many fewer users than Windows for a long time but it's doing just fine compared to most Windows hardware vendors.

Other phone vendors have moved from Windows Mobile & Symbian to Android, partly due to the free O.S. The customer profile of Symbian or Windows Mobile customers is likely not that of RIM customers, so it doesn't necessarily drive RIM's failure (although it could certainly increase the odds). He's looking for the problem that will mean RIM's failure.

The sexy marketing issue is similar. If RIM has survived okay up until now without it, good marketing might not cause the business to fail. It will certainly add to the danger, but the issue is again discovering the likely primary cause of failure.

That cause seems to be saturation of RIM's main customer segment(s) and an inability to grow outside of those segments. (Obviously, bad marketing and free alternatives are possible root causes of the latter!)

Please don't be driven up the wall - it's just an opinion :)

I guess he is pointing out that - Although Andriod is gaining market share, it isn't exactly eating into potential RIM market share. Other way to put it is that both RIM and Android target different set of customers.

P.S :- I am not making the above assertion. Just writing what i understood from reading that article.

Agreed, this quote from it is a good way to summarize, "The symptoms to watch closely are small declines in two metrics: the rate of growth of sales, and gross profit per unit sold (gross margins)".

A good book that elaborates on these is "Every Business is a Growth Business". Unless you are a lifestyle business with a well defended niche reaching a plateau is dangerous.

That "you're actually consuming the late adopters", You'll gulp through the late adopters, made me think of a different problem, that of fishing the oceans empty.

You could've gotten the same insights if you read (and understood) 2 books: Innovator's Dilemma and Chasm Companion. They are extremely insightful books about why companies succeed (and fail) and I felt that most of his assumptions came from the theories in those books, because I've been saying those things for over a year to a friend that works at RIM, but she never believed me because RIM "is doing so well financially".

Well it is quite interesting.

Is the distinction between "late-adopter" and "mainstream" specific to the author or well known?

If "late-adopters" are a less-than-desirable target audience, what about aiming at the "mainstream"?

I was going to disagree with your analogy, but then I realised that that would make the Storm the equivalent of Windows ME, and suddenly the analogy seemed much better :D

In both cases (Torch and Storm), I was keen to get my hands on them, but I could tell within about half a minute with each that they just didn't feel right. There was something deeply wrong with them.

I don't know what RIM's product problems really boil down to, but I would guess that at no point along the way do they have someone with good taste with the genuine authority to tell them to go back to the drawing board.

But I think perhaps it goes even deeper than that. RIM has its own implementation of Java UI controls, and even after all this time they are disturbingly primitive. It is genuinely difficult to make a good looking UI on a Blackberry. (As proof of this assertion, I invite the sceptic to do a quick Google search on centering text in controls on the Blackberry)

I think the section at the end about the author buying his wife a Torch (and his problems with its usability) are a strong indicator of your second point.

In my opinion, RIM's problem is that they feel like they defined what it was to be a smartphone. Now that they are no longer king of the hill, they are trying to replicate the current definition of a smart phone. Like the author alluded to, what they should be doing is re-defining a new space for themselves. RIM's never going to make the best iPhone. They need to go back to making the best Blackberry, whatever that is.

Blackberries are certainly the phone of choice for teenagers in the UK at the moment. According to my daughter this is entirely because of BBM

Apparently RIM has its own replacement for SMS that is dirt cheap, and this is what attracts the (extremely price sensitive) teens.

Not all teens are price sensitive of course, but those who are will get buried by outrageous SMS fees