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Comment by pavelstoev | Hacker News Reader

I worked at RIM/BlackBerry in 2005-06. It was my first engineering job. I was in my early 20’s and at some point, way before iPhone, I went to my manager and suggested we should add a camera and some multimedia features to the device, because that’s what the younger people wanted and used. He said - but why, BlackBerry is all about serving the business people market. We argued. Turns out we were both right and wrong…

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Did you know Matthias Wandel[0]?

I used to watch his YouTube videos all the time. And he used to talk about his days in RIM as he was one of the first engineer there. You reminded me to check his channel again and looks like he did a reaction video to the trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_w7T3JMXk4

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel

Unfortunately I did not know him but I will surely follow now :)

The 8100 was released in 2006 with its camera. I am sure it was in development for quite a while prior. That phones would all have cameras was a foregone conclusion by 2005.

Although only getting camera support in 2006 was rather late, and I wish I could find a good contemporary source for the Mike Lazaridis quote circa 2003 that "Cameraphones will be rejected by corporate users." (and thus Blackberrys won't have cameras, as their customers are companies, not end uses) from a couple of years earlier[1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jun/29/rim-chief... is an example of a second hand non-contemporary one. Although I did dig up https://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/it-s-small-addictiv... from 2004 which does at least have the fun quote "If you think about web browsing, shopping or banking services, how many of those are compelling enough to want to do from a phone?".

Similar experience on the internal shows at Nokia, when several of us tried to suggest Maemo should have a radio antenna instead of just wlan.

Rumor I heard at the time was Symbian "owned" GSM and was golden goose and wasn't about to let another project encroach on it.

Ie political, not technical or even strategic, decision.

It wasn't a rummor, political feuds were pretty much common in Nokia, at least until 2011, I can't vouch for how it looks like nowadays.

The ABC’s of business declined: arrogance, bureaucracy and complacency. It sounds like at least one of those were at play at RIM

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