BlackBerry Staged a Comeback by Winning over Car Companies

BB10 was a revolution in mobile OS’, but they absolutely bungled the launch.

What does every mobile OS need? An app marketplace with oodles of high-quality apps. And yet, BB offered a miserly $100 to any company who ported their app over. Why would any dev of any serious app take that kind of a deal? It was an insult to all but the largest companies who were going to port an app regardless.

What BB should have done is taken their massive war chest, and offered to pay companies for every download of their app. That they could be absolutely assured of making any port profitable. Have a sunrise period where it’s at 100%, then decline stepwise after that based on how many high-quality apps were making it into their App Store.

That could have knocked adoption out of the park, and made BB10 a serious third option.

But instead, they cheaped out, and killed the golden goose before it ever laid a single egg.