Did they really 'strangle the company'?
Blackberry had a meteroic rise and they collapsed because of iPhone and (later) Android.
Blackberry had a meteroic rise and they collapsed because of iPhone and (later) Android.
I wouldn't call RIM / Blackberry a meteroic rise. They start in the mid 90's and built up the products in a pretty smart way with each following the next until the total shift of the Storm.
I still use the well made power adapter (Micro USB) that came with it to charge devices to this day. Kinda sad seeing that blackberry logo and knowing the tablet was horrible.
As an active participant in Playbook's entire development from (near) start to end, there were multiple reasons. They weren't good reasons (most of my colleagues had, eh, concerns which got override,) but they somewhat made sense.
What happened was that multiple teams (internal and external) screwed up, so much so that the thing's internal was completely redesigned half way through development ie. Switched to a completely different SoC .
As another poster noted, their power supplies were great. I still have a couple left around my house. They had to be great partly because of a design oversight....
If they could have taken more time, it might have been better.
But the Playbook product did effectively expose the lack of depth, talent and relevant experience at RIM. I'm ashamed to say.
It would make for a great email + basic usage phone, but not for media consumption. And the camera's not great.
I used a BlackBerry Classic that also ran BB10 until December 2017, and I still pick it up from time to time and wish I could still use it. The Classic is unique in that it has three independent input methods, all of which work super well:
1. Touch screen: the BB10 OS is actually designed for touch, with fluid and intuitive gestures. Swipe up to go home, swipe up and to the right to go to the notifications hub (reverse the gesture to just peek), swipe left to pull off a screen layer to go back, swipe down from the top to view the settings pane (standard place for settings in every app).
2. Optical trackpad and hard nav buttons, just like on old BlackBerries. You can fully control the phone without touching the screen (great for when you're wearing thick gloves during winter). Works super well for a mouse pointer in the browser. The trackpad even works reasonably well in Android apps, which weren't designed for it (presumably, it piggy-backed on the accessibility focus stuff).
3. Hardware keyboard: typing experience is great—not necessarily faster, but super precise, and no pop-up keyboard getting in the way. Every app is designed with keyboard shortcuts in mind, and the OS makes discovery super easy, so stuff like [C]omposing an email, scrolling to the [T]op of the page, or scrolling to the [N]ext page in a PDF are single click operations. Modern BlackBerries also have great keyboards, but since they run Android, they have none of the shortcuts (except app shortcuts).
And it was a super outdated Android runtime that ran like dogshit compared to the native BB10 apps.
Also, if you wanted any sort of Google Play services stuff, you had to have an app on a laptop/desktop to sign all your apk's the same and remove a specific check... and you'd have to do it all over again every time you wanted to update an apk with play services.
Not ideal.
Build quality was very poor. Overall experience was very poor.
She ran back to iPhone as soon as she could.
RIM died because their products were poor compared to the competition, it's as simple as that.
BlackBerry was a small company up against the #1 product of the era (iPhone) and a 'free' competitor. Both companies are basically #1 and #2 brands in the world. They have very deep experience in all things, channels, money etc..
We had no 'mapping team' really, Google had 100 people.
iOS is from MacOS. BB had this ancient thing.
We were just a tiny company that got clobbered, but frankly, BB was culturally more like 'motorola' than an advanced, well run entity. BB could not compete.
RIM started in 1982, not in the 1990's. The 'rise' was quite meteoric when they decided to put email on your hip, and added a phone.
There was a fundamental change in phone capability and interaction that really shifted the market, and made new winners and losers.
Then the Passport launched, LOVED the format, best format ever squared and large screen, beautifully fitting everywhere though being larger, loved the TOUCH keyboard, loved the unified messaging but had NO F* network connection ever. Just could't be called or call others. A second Passport the same. Then one got dropped and it totally broke internally, the "steel frame" didn't help in any way, I assume it contributed due to its weight and momentum.
Reality is often a bit more nuanced than that.
Patent licensing fees were a big part of the equation, which led to inability to lower costs to compete.
Yes. OP asserted that too. Like OP, you haven't actually given a reason why. Here's some counter-arguments:
1) BB grew exponentially all the while paying Qualcomm licensing fees - why didn't it affect them then?
2) EVERYONE was paying the same licensing fees to Qualcomm. You couldn't build a smartphone connected to the cellular network and not pay those fees. So are you saying that it affected BB more than it affected Apple, Palm, MS, Samsung, etc. ?
As to #1, around BBOS v5 and v6, when they were pretty much top dog, all the cellphone accounts that wants to use a BB pays a service-access fee, or a BlackBerry Tax that goes to the company. Enterprise companies that want their emails and everything else also pays for the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. They were practically the only game in town.
They didn't have problem then, because they were rolling in cash; just like how they didn't have a problem basically buying up Philips st expanding, or keep coming up with phone models even though there's no way that there's enough demand to actually absorb the production.
#2 on top of needing to deal with Qualcomm licensing fees, which often applied (as the article stated) on non-qualcomm phones, they basically freaked out after losing that lawsuit to the patent troll, so they end up overpaying for licenses (not sure who's the licenser in this case) to avoid getting hit with more patent trolls. The contracts for those licenses were quite hard to get out of. By the time they were making the BlackBerry Priv, they don't have the SAF to juice their income. Patent licensing, Qualcomm and others, were disproportionally high, compared to other Android providers. They can't renegotiate some of them due to the contract wording. Being 1% of the market means Qualcomm hardly cared to give support, because Qualcomm is far more likely to help Samsung and other android phone, that pushed out far more numbers than BlackBerry did at the end.
It ends up being that they end up licensing their brand, because had they manufactured their own phone, they'd have to deal with the patent licensing contracts that they can't get out from.
There's probably a reason why OP won't be too forthright in describing why. I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
They sipped battery and data, and once that gear is setup, the SAF was very profitable.
Even to this day, email is not the same level of instant.