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Comment by flashgordon | Hacker News Reader

i am wondering if Blackberry made the wrong move by positioning itself as a reactor to the iphone?

what i mean is blackberry's position in the market (enterprise market anyway) has been solid and well understood (if not appreciated). for example, people (again atleast in the enterprise world anyway) wanted the keyboard and had gotten used to certain "ways" of using the blackberry..

by trying to create products to compete with the iPhone, blackberry has essentially conceded that their brand is inferior to the iPhone... this i think was unnecessary.. blackberry, with their "me too" products i think has now essentially acknowledged the iPhone as a potential player in the iphone, without actually (as yet) making a dent in the consumer market that iphone enjoys...

this is not new but amazing how it happens again and again by a big player in a certain market reacting to a potential threat..

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by trying to create products to compete with the iPhone, blackberry has essentially conceded that their brand is inferior to the iPhone.. Wait, What?

How is competing at all the same as conceding? The opposite is true in fact, not competing is conceding. RIM is going after a market of people that enjoyed their Blackberry's but loved the 'trendy appeal' of the touch screen iPhone. This doesn't mean that the people who want an actual keyboard can no longer use a Blackberry. They can stick with the Bold, which I'm sure will not be the last real keyboard phone that RIM ever makes. The Storm will serve to keep plenty of already existing customers from switching to the iPhone or G1 because they like the Blackberry system, or it's standard for their companies. It will also likely drive new customers who want the professional appeal of a Blackberry with but still dream about the iPhone. In plenty of industries iPhone's are regarded as a tech toy, not a business tool.

RIM has also already deviated from the full keyboard with the introduction of the Pearl, which was targeted as a more consumer phone to compete with Motorola and Nokia and this has been a great success.

i am sorry.. i wasnt clear there.. you are right competing doesnt mean conceding defeat... but its the way you do it..

my only point was that the range of products that RIM brought out were more along "me too" line rather than ones of true innovation... here i was talking purely about the bold and the storm lines...

agree pearl is no way in direct competition with iphone or any where close but i was only referring to blackberry's response with its bold and storm lines...

but having said that it can be argued that if the market demands iPhone-like phones then creation of a new brand (ie with the storm and bold) may be an answer...

I don't think they did that. They haven't abandoned their standard product line, in fact they just released the Bold which may be the best of that paradigm.

They released the Storm to cater to the 75% of Americans who don't want to be on AT&T for whatever reason. When the iPhone was released, everyone said "Apple is going to make it about the device, not the carrier" but the reality is they haven't. A lot of people haven't purchased one simply because they prefer another carrier.

Blackberry is giving them an alternative with the Storm. I don't know if it's a good one (maybe not) but it's probably the best, and will probably sell decently just for that.

> by trying to create products to compete with the iPhone, blackberry has essentially conceded that their brand is inferior to the iPhone

Does this mean that Google, by creating GMail to compete with hotmail was conceding that their brand is inferior to hotmail?

no, but gmail was (and is) a much superior product... it was essentially a redesign ground up..

with storm what is new? sure it has a 3.2 mp camera vs iphone's "paultry" 2 mp and a screen area that is 0.4" larger...

again my issue was with the copy-cat behaviour ... again should have worded that better... what RIM is doing with Storm and Bold is no different from MS's attempts with Zune...

PS: the above 2 differences are not the only differences. Just examples :D

I think the analogy here would be if Google had GMail, but then also decided to create another mail app that was similar to hotmail.

Hotmail's a bad comparison, because they're two products in the same market with similar features. What if Google tried to make a product that was competing with something like MobileMe, which has less features but works much nicer - and at a cost?

I think Blackberry's trying to compete with Apple was inevitable, and I think they've got some good ideas. But they're dealing with a much higher-quality competitor, in a different field. Phone manufacturers are trying to make a competing phone. They need to work on making competing mini-computers. RIM is the top smart-phone maker, but they're competing in a different (albeit overlapping) field now, and their first attempt was a dud. I think if they didn't try, that Apple would (and still very well may) swamp them within a few years. So they're responding. But their first foray has been a dud.

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