- Don't imitate them and steadily cede market share
- Imitate them and immediately alienate your user base
I often wonder what they really should have done?
They could have pivoted to Android earlier. I had a BlackBerry Q10 and their BB10(QNX) was actually pretty good (the unified messaging was amazing at the time), but it was clear even then that without proper Android app/ecosystem support, it was always doomed to struggle. (their clever emulator was great, but wasn't enough). - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXewkl5K7-M
When they finally did pivot to Android, their phones were pretty good (I carried the "BB Priv" for a long time, and the KeyOne was great from my short time with it). But they were way too late by then, and had to face the onslaught of Samsung / LG competition, who all had newer tech at cheaper pricing.
A BlackBerry Priv in 2011 might have saved the company, it would be competing against a "Droid Razr" and an iPhone 4S. The Priv actually arrived in 2015, and was competing against a Galaxy S6 Edge and iPhone 6S Plus. It was way too late -- people who loved their keyboards had already learned to survive with "phablet"-sized smartphones for a few years by then.
The BB OS was great, if a bit slow. The worst part of it was the terrible browser, which really didn't do it any favors, but the communications part of it was so good I could work around it. I don't care much for any mobile browsers, everything is better on a real computer, but at least Safari doesn't crawl to a stop.
I had high hopes for the QNX phones, but RIM sure didn't. But you're right, by the time they had pivoted to Android so they could take advantage of the "App market," it was too late.
Having had a BB for so many years, pawing at a screen makes me feel like the monkeys at the Monolith. I used the BB as my primary email tool, it was just that good at what it did.
I thought about that. They could have been really competitive with some of the early Droid phones, which were really what brought Android to a lot of people in the early days.
But I also remember that a lot of those companies really struggled to reach profitability with their Android phone lines. It was a hypercompetitive space with really low margins.
Maybe it would have worked if combined with their security reputation and with BBM.
Is it a tragedy, though? I think most companies are doing well if they manage to return billions to their initial shareholders by exploiting a breakthrough product for a few years. Companies aren’t meant to last forever. They exist to enrich shareholders for a while - hopefully a long time, but everyone realizes most companies eventually are bought or fail due to changing market conditions.
A bit of a shame that never came to fruition honestly
I could appreciate the need for the incumbents to come up with _something_ to counteract the iPhone wave, but it all seemed rather hopeless at the time.
But they all wanted their own proprietary thing, even today. Blackberry came really close to getting major telecoms onboard for adopting BBM as their over the top replacement, but it never closed (iirc they argued about price).
I feel that if telecoms realized what they are, which is infrastructure dumb pipes, things like interoperable standards would be easier for them to adopt. Look at the failure of Verizon trying to diversify, they just shut down BlueJeans (a zoom competitor) and haven't really done much with Yahoo since acquisition.
He was over-ruled, and sometimes I wonder which one is more bitter about (effectively) losing their company - Jim (IIRC), who played Cassandra and was ignored, or Mike, who didn't trust him enough.