All they had to do was keep focused on their actual demographic (high-end office workers), allow their other demographic (drug dealers / buyers), and let everyone else worry about consumers.
Always refine the keyboard, unquestionable notifications, ignore the “single pane of glass” trend, and definitely not even a single phone with Android.
Their user-base would be “small”, but so what. Noone needs 8 Billion users. 100M is plenty to sustain R&D.
(edit: clarity)
To use an old adage: If Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, he would have given them a faster horse.
But I think that analogy proves my point. If Blackberry asked people what they wanted before they saw iPhone, they'd say "better physical keyboard phone" (faster horse). But after the iPhone took off they pointed to that instead (wait.. cars are better).
Single pane of glass is nice, and has benefits, but it’s a definite tradeoff as the on-screen keyboard is no longer tactile
Then there was Verizon pushing them to release phones that would work well on their new 4G networks, while Blackberrys were being optimised for 2.5G as one of their CEOs was determined to preserve the selling point of great battery life.
The companies they relied on were not letting them fall into a niche product-producer role. They would have been pushed out of the market, not even by their competitors, by their partners.
Thanks for mentioning it.
Having said that, I am not sure they could have withstood the app revolution without participating in. I do think they made major mistakes in their strategy at critical points, but simply focusing on their core business demographic might not have been enough. The get corporate IT on board, IIRC, you had to run a Blackberry Enterprise Server (?) for security and corporate connectedness. This was not cheap. That was becoming increasingly problematic as the iPhone and Android infrastructures caught up security-wise. In the end the cost to maintain the Blackberry servers was no longer justifiable as many people wanted the shiny new phones with all the apps.
You’re right about the BES requirement but they could have easily gone SAAS-optional when the industry shifted to the cloud.
I found it to be way better than the Blackberry. If they had forced me back to the BlackBerry I probably would have found a new job.
And, a huge number of colleagues who saw me using it at work got excited and put in requests for their own iPhones. It was just so much easier and more pleasant to read on the iPhone.
If they had opened up BBM, WhatsApp would never have happened.
It was just at exactly the right point in history: it was better than the rest in some ways, had great FOMO, SMS was super expensive, and I don't think anyone else had real-time messaging on mobile when they first did.
Yes: I think they could have eaten the market until the iPhone, and Apple would have been playing catch-up to BB.