BlackBerry to cut 4,500 jobs, predicts 2nd quarter loss of $950M | Hacker News Reader

BlackBerry to cut 4,500 jobs, predicts 2nd quarter loss of $950M

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162 pointsmrcharles152 comments

The timeless story of Ozymandias -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias -- (if you don't know the 1818 sonnet by Shelley, read it before downvoting. It's relevant and timeless)

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away".

EDIT: Thanks for the link to the excellent Breaking Bad video. For what it's worth, I haven't seen an episode since season 3 so didn't realize the coincidence. My pop culture connection would have been to Watchmen.

Kipling's The Palace is also fitting perhaps even more so for those building today's successful platforms: http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_palace.htm.

WHEN I was a King and a Mason - a Master proven and skilled

I cleared me ground for a Palace such as a King should build.

I decreed and dug down to my levels. Presently under the silt

I came on the wreck of a Palace such as a King had built.

There was no worth in the fashion - there was no wit in the plan -

Hither and thither, aimless, the ruined footings ran -

Masonry, brute, mishandled, but carven on every stone:

"After me cometh a Builder. Tell him I too have known.

Swift to my use in the trenches, where my well-planned ground-works grew,

I tumbled his quoins and his ashlars, and cut and reset them anew.

Lime I milled of his marbles; burned it slacked it, and spread;

Taking and leaving at pleasure the gifts of the humble dead.

Yet I despised not nor gloried; yet, as we wrenched them apart,

I read in the razed foundations the heart of that builder’s heart.

As he had written and pleaded, so did I understand

The form of the dream he had followed in the face of the thing he had planned.

When I was a King and a Mason, in the open noon of my pride,

They sent me a Word from the Darkness. They whispered and called me aside.

They said - "The end is forbidden." They said - "Thy use is fulfilled.

"Thy Palace shall stand as that other’s - the spoil of a King who shall build."

I called my men from my trenches, my quarries my wharves and my sheers.

All I had wrought I abandoned to the faith of the faithless years.

Only I cut on the timber - only I carved on the stone:

"After me cometh a Builder. Tell him, I too have known."

Bryan Cranston of this to promote the second half of the final season of Breaking Bad. It's set to some beautiful shots of the New Mexico desert.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3dpghfRBHE

"Not available in your country."

This is absurd, considering what I imagine the content to be.

Here's another version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU-PXfzsj4o

There's something particularly ironic about calling Ozymandias timeless.

It's a bit of a "the king is dead; long live the King!" thing. There will always be an Ozymandias.

The poem is itself ironic... it's about Ramses III who rule c. 1000 BC and yet was famous enough that poetry would be inspired by him 3000 years later.

I agree. When I was younger, I only got the obvious message about the transience of material accomplishment. The poem is more multifaceted than that.

One starting place is to think about the layers of interpretation (Ramses -> sculptor -> traveler -> narrator). Everyone concerned is still talking, in different ways, about the memory of Ramses.

As long as we're on the topic, here's one of my favorite expressions of parallels between us and people in the past:

https://plus.google.com/+Cornell/posts/MSaUEUpVB8q

This bench sits behind the library at Cornell University.

Lacking belief in an afterlife, many early civilizations instead strove to achieve immortality in "kleos": the fame that does not decay.

Certainly relevant, but, Breaking Bad fan?

No, the Breaking Bad writers are fans of Ozymandius.

I first thought of "Watchmen" by Alan Moore.

Or "Civilization IV", which had this narrated by Leonard Nimoy :)

Am I the only one around here... Who was not educated by pop culture references, But actually remembers reading this in school?

Yeah, yeah, I get it, it's fun when we find subtle references to pop culture in the greater world around us. But it just seems wrong when the pop reference replace the actual culture (or maybe the irony is so subtle as to seem non-ironic, ironically--or something).

Somebody should update the wikipedia page with a "References in Pop Culture" section.

Eh, I suspect there were people who thought the same as you when Shakespeare packaged up Greek mythology and fart jokes for the unwashed masses.

Right, but since then, we've attempted to give everyone a liberal arts education. But many are resistant to that and prefer the teat of the entertainment industry.

Nothing wrong with hearing about something on TV and googling it (Wikipedia has revolutionized instant knowledge in this way). It's the people who don't dig deeper and don't realize the prior reference and deeper meaning to begin with. And so it seems like they're missing the subtle reference to the real world in the TV show.

Seems a bit of an extrapolation, no? I never read Ozymandias in school, but I'm certain I've read very worthwhile literary works you've yet to read also. The notion that not having read some arbitrary, singular work implies general cultural ignorance is, well, about as silly as the statement sounds. It's almost as if different places and different times have different things in their English curricula! ;)

Going from "has not read a particular work" to "prefers the teat of the entertainment industry" is a bit of a leap.

Jeez man, Breaking Bad was just last week. Show a little originality in your postings.

It's a poem that had great meaning before Breaking Bad, and a poem that will retain it's meaning long after Breaking Bad is forgotten.

I never saw that show, and the poem seemed quite relevant to me.

I've been thinking about RIM lately and I think they basically had chances to turn themselves around, but took neither.

The first was in '08/'09 - shortly after the iPhone. Some companies (Google, Samsung) saw where the industry was going, made the appropriate decisions and are now profiting handsomely. In hindsight, that was the right time for RIM to acquire QNX and start on BB10, which might have done very well had it come out in 2011. With decent hardware, a solid OS, their own style and riding on BBM (big at that time), they might have staked a sustainable 10-15% chunk of the market.

The second chance was '10/'11, around the time of Nokia's Burning Platform Memo. This is when RIM started on BB10, but as we see now, it was already too late. Had they bet heavily on Android and on their strengths (security, gov & enterprise sales), they might be doing pretty-well today.

I hope the Waterloo area survives this well.

These are always more easily seen looking from the future into the past, than they are in the past looking to the future.

Few companies, with the market share RIM had, see threats as 'near term'. Fewer still have a deep appreciation for the entirety of the technology stack and the time it takes to move things. This is especially true of young executives but can happen to anyone.

RIM's technology stack matured over many years, from idea to business juggernaut. What that tells you is that moving the stack is also going to take years, so if you're experienced you start looking 5 - 6 years out not 1 - 2 years out.

When the iPhone hit, and Google was close behind, that was a huge signal. But Ballmer and Microsoft dismissing it, was a huge counter-signal. If you're an enterprise IT company, and the biggest company in Enterprise IT in the market place is dismissing the iPhone as a 'fad', you might be inclined to believe them rather than your own people who are saying "this is a threat".

At some point you get behind the power curve. In airplanes once you are behind the curve there is literally nothing you can do which will prevent you from eventually crashing. The same it true in companies. RIM apparently decided early on that Microsoft was a more credible indicator of the future than Apple/Google for their marketplace. And they have paid the ultimate price for that.

nit, but Ballmer did not dismiss the iPhone, he dismissed the $500 on contract iPhone. And he even said "it may sell very well". Here's the actual video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

I know it's become fun to pretend like Ballmer dismissed the iPhone but I have a hard time watching that video and seeing anything like that.

That is a fair point. Microsoft's behavior however, with regard to "supporting" the iPhone as a new way to do business, was tepid at best.

Microsoft's phone team did react promptly. Probably not many people remember that they were originally planning to ship a "Windows Mobile 7" product which was an evolution of WM6. They axed that and started over, and the result was Windows Phone 7.

They messed up a lot of things both before and after that point (sometime in 2009 I think?), but there was a definite change in course in reaction to where the market was going.

Why would Microsoft have to "support" the iPhone way back then? I'm pretty sure they would have supported it if they had ready iPhone competitor back in the days, but given that they didn't have it, the only logical thing to do about it is to ignore it and silently working on catch up, which is exactly what they did.

At the time Microsoft was the single largest supplier of IT software to enterprises. Part of the appeal of Blackberry phones was they integrated well with the systems used in the enterprise.

In that environment, if Microsoft starts supporting iPhone like they support Blackberry (Exchange integration, a sharepoint app, what have you) then it is a strong signal that Microsoft has looked at the iPhone, and what it represents, and has decided its going to be a 'big deal' in the Enterprise space going forward.

It's an imperfect signal to be sure, but often treated like an 'outside opinion.' Using an example from my own history, I was trying to get NetApp to build a filer on the Opteron hardware and the lead marketing guy wouldn't believe the AMD64 stuff was "real" until Dell started shipping a server using it. That was a tool he was using to validate (or invalidate) my argument that AMD64 was the future of the x86 architecture.

So RIM, seeing Microsoft's response, might use that to "confirm" an internal opinion that the iPhone (and perhaps smart phones in general) wasn't a serious threat.

I of course have no way of knowing one way or the other, but I've seen it happen that way, and the hypothesis fits the actions as we know them today. I presume they could have started/done the BB10 "anytime" but only started once they had collectively internalized the threat to their market. So by that reasoning I speculate they didn't believe it to be a threat until much later.

Remember when they held a public funeral for the iPhone?

Story here:

http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-iphone-funeral-2010...

Not that it matters but, it wasn't public.

I was toying with the idea of posting snark suggesting that RIM's problems are attributable to Microsoft villainy. Truth is stranger than fiction however, and here I find a thoughtful HN intellect assigning some of blame to Ballmer.

RIM got caught out by a change to corporate culture - bring your own device - largely driven by economic decisions in response to the recession combined with a restructuring of the mobile market and a generation of hardware that leapfrogged RIM's product line in terms of status appeal.

What happened is Apple changed the market and Ballmer's dissing of a competitor did not mean that Microsoft scaled back its research efforts or gave up its cultural bias toward long term plays.

In airplanes once you are behind the curve there is literally nothing you can do which will prevent you from eventually crashing. The same it true in companies.

I'm going to say the physics of aerodynamics is not a good analogy for business competition.

A good metaphor here is angle of attack. If you try to fly at too steep an angle of attack, you just stall. If you say right out of the gate that you want to raise a $5 million series A round, unless you're in a very strong position, you not only won't get that but won't get anything. Better to start at a low angle of attack, build up speed, and then gradually increase the angle if you want.

Seems the anologies come in handy, though. He's basically saying momentum needs to be respected. And key inflection points, once missied, may not re-appear.

They lost me for two reasons. The first was updates and bug fixes. For example on my BB pausing the music player resulted in the battery being drained flat in less than an hour. They fixed that but of course the update never made it my phone and carrier. Add in 5 minute boot times, and randomly finding it locked up and needing a physical reset. Or the survey on a website about what your favourite app was to daily reboot your phone!

The second reason was them not standing behind their hardware. The warranty was a year. The bluetooth module failed after one year and 3 months, and it turns out this happened to a large number of people with that model. Tough luck.

There is so much choice these days, that narrowing down is done by using any reason. That is why I wouldn't touch another BB and as a recommender to my friends they don't either. This kind of thing can be fixed, but it requires a long track record of redemption. (HTC is also on the do not touch list due to a lack of sustained redemption.)

That. Very much that.

Plus, global roaming. It's kinda sad nobody ever thinks about it…

BlackBerry was able to provide worldwide flatrate roaming (well, they could, but it was up to each carrier to sell it as a product or bill each user to death).

Now, BB10 loses that capability. In fact, BB10 is completely and absolutely dumb when it comes to be an enterprise phone: multiple massive inboxes with different providers/technologies, many contacts, busy agenda, roaming and travel planning.

BlackBerry could have been today the perfect companion for people who really mean business. Or, at least, a very powerful one (people sometimes don't mind carrying two phones). But with an utterly expensive, beta-grade[1] device that does none of these things, I can't find a single reason why someone wouldn't pick an Android or an iPhone. Even for business.

[1] http://blackberryq10.tumblr.com/

Unless I'm mistaken, every cell phone maker has only a standard one-year warranty. I agree with all the points you made. I just don't think a longer warranty would have helped them.

They could have addressed the issue and it doesn't matter if it was the warranty or some other mechanism. eg all they had to say was that if bluetooth failed on that model then they would replace the phone or give you a certain amount of credit towards a new one.

Bluetooth is critical functionality for anyone who commutes by car, and those who talk a lot. It isn't some rarely used side feature. A phone where this stops working is very notable, a huge pain and you are forced to resolve it almost immediately.

>"...their strengths (security, gov & enterprise sales), they might be doing pretty-well today."

Yeah, while pretty much everyone witnessed and understands the failure of RIM to respond to the iPhone and hardware/OS missteps it might not be so well known that they were failing to properly service their existing strengths at the same time.

In my experience, lots of Enterprise/Government folks really didn't and likely still don't care about touchscreens and apps (for their employees), just email/PIN.

Problem was, the sometimes painful software/support plus lengthy, too frequent SRP outages ensured that BES and the Blackberries connected to them would be abandoned at the first opportunity.

They should've moved to Android by 2011, when it was obvious that it was going to become dominant. If they'd built touchscreen phones with slide-out keyboards (like the Motorola Droid) and built an Android-based OS that also included their proprietary messaging and email solutions, I imagine they would be quite successful now.

Not sure if you are tolling, but to move to Android by 2011 they would have had to start in 2010 or 2009. The first Android release was September 23, 2008 and you remember how ummm "good" it was right? And on so many devices too and "obvious" that it was going to become dominant. So they could either keep printing money with their existing OS they own and know or migrate to an unknown and new operating system made by some other company with unknown problems...

I had a meeting with a BB VP in 2009. I had seen my friend's HTC and asked what we were doing in response to Android.

He asked me, "What's Android?"

I think they would have had to drive two different product lines, their traditional BBs (I know a few people who still cling to theirs) and some kind of AndroidBB. But marketing that and differentiating the two lines would have been a royal mess.

They had two CEOs. Let each take one platform.

Yeah, I really worry about Waterloo. The city is basically a company town. If Rim folds, all the geeks could roll up their tracks and head for Toronto or the USA, leaving the city broken. I mean, they'd still have the university...but that's not enough.

They still have their chances with Android.

All they have to do is make the best damn Android devices.

Considering they have money, they can do it.

Other than that, nothing short of miraculous futuretech invention-acquisition will save them.

This is an empty, useless comment full of hot air, and using swear words does nothing to support the poor assumptions and reasoning that you made.

The "best" devices will never sell without marketing. And if RIM does move to Android, that signals that they gave up and tried to stave off their decline/death by exploiting the Android market. Not to mention that with the competition, RIM has even less of a chance.

I recommend thinking of a unique comment/argument that doesn't repeat what is already said. If you cannot think of one, then please don't post a useless comment that turns this into a Reddit thread.

Half of your comments on HN so far are meta comments about how bad other comments are. You will not have a good time of it if you continue down this path. Stay on topic.

I mainly browse HN to read good/stimulating discussions and submissions, to expand my knowledge, to see other users' reasoning, to develop and maintain a improvement/scientist attitude, and to try to maintain a good quality experience for other users. I'm not here to "have a good time" - if that's what you mean.

But I'm noticing a trend in decreasing submission and comment quality, and I don't know if other users realize that or if they are ignorant of it. HN is becoming more "average" everyday, and I feel that more and more readers are commenting with ignorance, unfounded assumptions, and generally bad arguments overall. In short, a lot of the comments are useless/inaccurate/invalid. I'm sure you notice it as well? How are we supposed to address this issue?

If it's frowned upon to post meta-comments (on HN or any forum or article), then I wish there was a service or feature (not restricted to HN) that allows people to submit/receive feedback and constructive criticism on their comments and diction.

You see many people using words such as "obviously", "only", "completely", but this category of words (degree/intensifier adverbs) is improper/inaccurate to use many times because of the unfounded/unsupported assumptions that they imply. It make me cringe every time I see that. It's an identifying feature of a bad comment, or one that could be better if more effective diction were used.

And improperly using those words puts a severe hole in the argument, but people still treat these types of comments the same way as valid ones when they shouldn't.

Update: I think HN may want to implement the scoring system used on Slashdot to evaluate posts/comments based on relevance, usefulness, information, or insight. This way, there will be no need to post meta-comments to attempt to correct negative behavior that results in the degradation of the community and the decreasing insight and relevance of posts.

"swear words"?

started developping apps for mobile in 2009. at that time, i aimed for ios development and blackberry. it took me 2 months to get my first app on ios, and i thought "ok, now let's start learning about blackberry".

So, i downloaded their doc. iirc, they had three ways to develop apps. one was using web technology, and you couldn't do much. then they had two different sets of java apis : an old, discontinued one, with which you seemed to be able to have things work, and a new one, soon to be released, and undocumented.

so i installed their sdk, on my mac, and tried to run a "hello world". but their sdk required windows, because the simulator didn't exist on mac. i had just bought and dual-boot installed a windows 7. but the sdk was just for xp, so i had to run an XP vm inside my windows. then i launched eclipse, to launch the simulator, to launch the Java program that was supposed to run my hello world.

i never was patient enough for that hello world to show.

then i said " well...let's get back to that once a customer ask for a blackberry development".

and guess what, that customer never came.

I had almost this exact same scenario happen to me. As a developer, I was excited to see what new fun things at the time (2009) were coming out of RIM. To my dismay, like yours, I couldn't even get a hello world to run after much tinkering and configuring. After I learned that they didn't even use the SDK they released into the wild in their own development, I knew it was a lost company. Dogfood and all that.

Your experience reminds me of an amusing open letter by a developer (original blog is down, I found a copy) to Developer Relations of RIM: https://www.memonic.com/user/ChrisPolus/folder/4738150b-bd22...

so i installed their sdk

In 2010, I didn't even get this far.

It's unfortunate, as someone who just purchased a Q10 (switched from Android), I think they've finally got their act together and released something excellent.

The Q10's battery life is great, the hardware keyboard is solid and travels well. The Paratek antenna gets the best reception and data connection of any device I've ever used. The BB10 software isn't great, but it's decent. (It's certainly far better than where WebOS / iOS / Android was when they launched. Even today, BB10.2 is significantly better / more powerful than Windows Phone 8, even if the UI is less well defined).

Their story, to me, seems almost down to timing. They're executing pretty well right now, it's just two to three years too late.

It will be sad to watch all that hardware die. In a year or two, there probably won't be any devices available that have a large battery, solid hardware keyboard, and decent cellular data reception.

This is frustrating - I agree that they've finally gotten their act together, particularly with 10.2. The writing has been on the wall for a while - I stopped building apps for them earlier this year.

I've tried Android and iPhone and don't particularly want to return to either one. The former because of too many apps that want all the permissions under the sun while the OS offers a complete lack of fine-grained controls of them[1], and a subpar UI experience (subjective, I know). The latter due to lack of control without rooting it. My windows 8 desktop experience has spoiled that OS for me on a phone, fairly or otherwise.

But it begins to look like I will have no choice very soon. I hope they manage to pull out of this - they're still releasing a new flagship, and have other irons in the fire - but it's not looking good.

[1] as in 'yes, let the app get to GPS, but no do not let it get to my personal data or phone info'. Something BBOS legacy offered, and BB10 only slightly less - when you make an app you were expected to plan for the user to deny functionality and degrade nicely.

I completely agree, especially around the permissions.

I'm also worried that this is the end. Every previous company thats built decent 'prosumer' or 'power-user' phones appears to be dead or dying.

I loved my Palm Pre (WebOS), it was my first smartphone. They're dead now.

I upgraded to an HTC Arrive (Windows Phone 7), but HTC's slowly dying off, and no one makes (or Microsoft blocks?) hardware keyboards for that platform now. Windows Phone also didn't support any notifications or push notifications at the time (and 'live tiles' aren't solid enough to replace them).

I upgraded to a Motorola Photon Q. Software's ok, and there's no terrible skin. But the battery life and reception are both terrible (and the battery is sealed in, so every day it gets worse...). I knew the sealed battery was a mistake, I tried it anyway and got burned. Won't be making that mistake again.

The Q10 was my last refuge. When BlackBerry goes away, I suspect there will be literally nothing left for me to turn to.

Android 4.3 has that fine-grained permission control built in now, but it's hidden. It may not be 100% production ready, but it can be exposed and used by apps that launch it, such as: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.schurich.a...

Of course, the chances are that no small number of apps you might be tempted to restrict will promptly crash since they'll assume that having asked for the permission up front means they'll get whatever data they want when they ask for it.

Agreed. The Q10 is a great phone, and the OS is the best I've used on any smartphone (iphone, lumia). The touchscreen / physical keyboard combo is awesome and unique to BlackBerry. They have a winning product here.

I can't wait for the Z30. That should bring more people to the fold.

Alas, Q10 does not compete with iOS from 6 years ago.

That's an interesting kneejerk response that one hears variations of whenever anybody brings up any smartphone OS that is not their One True OS. Do you have particular things that it doesn't do that iOS of six years ago did?

The point is not about wether it is better or worse than iOS from 6 years ago, that parent probably believes it is better than that, but the problem is that the choice today is about BB10 or iOS 7. It's competing against todays phones, so how much better or worse it is than the iPhone was at launch is mostly irrelevant to the current market of smartphone buyers.

Possibly; that's not how I read that response, because it that and variations upon it really are common responses when speaking of a Phone Other Than My Favorite, and your interpretation seems to be seldom how it's intended. (It's also not something you typically see as much of here, so it stood out a bit.)

To your point, though - aside from some gee-whiz features like fingerprint capture, it offers similar features and functionality as iOS. More in some ways, less in others.

The only thing it actually doesn't offer is the range apps - most importantly apps that everyone puts out by default for android and iphone. (And consequently provides additional free advertising for those platforms) Their legacy OS left a bad taste and so they never captured mindshare of mobile developers. Combine that with a complete failure of marketing, and it never had a chance at large-scale uptake.

Who cares? If bb want me to shell out 600 quid now their product has to compete with the phones of now not the ones from six years ago.

That's a subjective remark and one I completely disagree with. The BlackBerry OS is cleverly designed and the finger gestures make using it addictive even.

Seems to me the best thing that could happen to them would be a bankruptcy followed by either a sell-off, or a split-off, of their design division (and all associated hardware contracts.) Then you'd have the equivalent of a fresh start-up making these phones, with no debts. They'd probably do pretty well.

THey're already debt-free, I'm not sure that bankruptcy can help?

But will they have enough engineers on board to make a phone? The hardware game is quite expensive.

Was digging up some numbers. In 2010, BlackBerry still sold more phones than Apple.

How the mighty have fallen.

What were the real problems then that led to their fall? Lack of technology innovation? badly run company and operations? lost touch with the consumer? All of the above?

I'd put it under both "lack of technology innovation" and "lost touch with the consumer".

Around 2007 with the release of the iPhone, the smartphone market shifted massively. Within a relatively short time, people wanted phones with (relatively speaking, for the time) gigantic screens, no hardware keyboards, fluid touch-based UIs, and abundant third-party apps. Apple delivered on this, and Google followed fairly closely behind.

BB was caught flat-footed and took years to catch up on the UI and form factor, by which time they were too late to catch up on the apps, which is probably what ultimately killed them. BB's success was in a time where the phone maker and the carrier were expected to provide nearly all of the useful functionality on a phone, whereas with iPhone and Android, while they're still expected to be useful out of the box, it's also expected that the user will heavily customize them with third-party apps.

Those problems might not have been insurmountable. But the app situation was at the very least an illustration of why they were doomed from the get-go. When you require someone to send in a notarized photocopy of your government ID card before you'll let them develop software for your platform, well. . . I don't even know what to say. That policy spoke for itself.

You can add badly run company to the list as well. They refused to acknowledge any problems until relatively recently. Even after a senior exec went public with an email describing the problems (link: http://bgr.com/2011/06/30/open-letter-to-blackberry-bosses-s...), they still continued to deny and paint a rosy picture (which steadily got worse) to the investors and internal staff.

I am not sure they ever were in touch with the consumer. Their business was built on the enterprise, but they somewhat accidentally got a lot of consumer customers (teenagers lured by the cheap (or was that even free?) messaging)

I don't think they ever truly realized what that should mean for their product range.

There were a few key parts to this (and lots more that I'm missing).

1] OS felt dated. Failure to come closer to what customers wanted on a timely basis.

2] Poor app developer experience.

3] A lot of different hardware specs against which to develop apps.

4] Not enough apps. Missing key apps.

5] Slow to innovate after settling on major patent case. The company became very lawyer focused which slowed innovation to a crawl.

I'm sure I'm missing tons of stuff and this would be a great case study, but as a former employee this is coming from my perspective.

2) Was one of the biggest. I went to their first-ever developer conferences in San Jose and the very few people who bothered to show up, who were most internal IT-type people from big BlackBerry users like Morgan and Merrill, were in open revolt about how shitty the APIs were, how easy it was to develop a nice-looking application for the iPhone, and how appalling the new touchscreen handset was.

Keep in mind this was in the very early days of iOS when they had almost no features and their APIs were a mess. RIM still had advantages over iOS back then, but they didn't have either the user or developer experience to exploit them.

I would add culture to that whereby executive leadership and downward did not admit to problems and felt the platform was infallible. As a graduate of Waterloo, I can attest that between 2008-2011 people in the KW area were steadfast in denying the future of mobile and the underlying problems at RIM/BlackBerry.

I would agree with you. In a former life I had interactions with BB in a sales capacity. I sold into or had customers at many of the Top 50 "tech" companies. BB/Rim had one of the strangest, most insular cultures I came across. Maybe early on they felt really patronized by US/SV VC's/companies etc and so were anti US. Either way it was quite odd. I really wondered how that would end up working out for them.

It's hard to really put a finger on whether it's a part of being Canadian or whether particular businesses and corporations are constantly in search a state of denial. For the longest time, Microsoft was in the state of denial about their competition and refused to admit they were/are far behind them.

But on the other hand, you have Silicon Valley culture that tends to fuel adoption and promotion of products/startups in the Valley. So I feel as though while it's true that RIM/BlackBerry was for some time judged unfairly by Americans and Wall Street.

Yes. In general when I sold to Canadian companies one had to tread differently vs US companies. There is an inherent sort of reserve for US companies. Yet RIM went well beyond that (just one person's experience though)

6] It became cool to bash BB (severe brand degradation). BB10 is competitive, but the average consumer doesn't know this and doesn't care

Yeah everyone I've met in the last few years has felt a need to pre-emptively justify their choice of smart phone to me. I guess they get ragged on a lot by their friends for having an outdated phone.

I think they just flat-out missed the shift of gravity from carriers to consumers.

I think BlackBerry considered their customers to be (a) the carriers and (b) IT departments. End users weren't considered their customers until it was too late.

Ballsillie and Lazaridis were the problem. They just sat on their cash cow and milked it. They also apparently didn't have a knack for selecting great managment. I remember in 2010 trying to figure out why BB sold the Curve, Tour, and Bold.

that's easy, they just didn't come out with a new model. I waited and waited and then iphone 5 came out so I gave up on RIM and switched. I dislike the iPhone, but it's better than my old curve, mostly. Now I'm locked and can't go back to Blackberry without a financial penalty. I suspect there are a lot of people in the similar position. Even if we wanted to support RIM we can't.

reminds me of sega. Anyone could come in and do what they do.

I was really hoping they could turn it around -- by all accounts the new phones are pretty nice and the mobile OS market could use some more serious competitors. But they have virtually no apps and no clear path to getting apps. Combine that with BYOD policies that let employees bring their own phones instead of having one issued and their whole sales model goes out the window.

They don't have some big name apps like Audible yet (there are substitutes) but the app selection is decent. There are even some gems for BlackBerry you won't find anywhere else.

Speaking as an enterprise customer on long upgrade cycles, RIM/Blackberry badly judged the situation vis a vis their enterprise customer base.

The new Z10 was not compatible with their large install base of Blackberry Enterprise Server. Anyone still running BES at the time the Z10 was introduced was likely to be a shop interested in security and control of the mobile platform their end users were using.

Which is why businesses like my employer and many others kept buying BB OS7 devices (did you notice they didnt break numbers out and actually mentioned BBOS7 as a significant portion during their investor call ?)

TL;DR: They thought all their enterprise customers would upgrade fast, they guessed wrong.

We're closing in on the launch of cross-platform BBM, and much of the work for that wasn't even done internally. They contracted that stuff out. Now they're cutting actual BB people. A lot of it is dead weight, and the usual bloated middle management, but I can't wait to see who else gets the axe here.

Make no mistake, the goal is to sell the company at this point. That is why BBM is suddenly the focus. They know that they aren't going to stay afloat with phone sales. They'll cut to the bone, and beef up one of their main commodities (BBM) until the sale happens.

This is incorrect. It was mostly done in-house, with some outside help.

Mostly? This may depend on perspective. The infrastructure behind the app is definitely in-house, but the UI isn't at all.

NO. Teary eyed. :(

3.7 million phone sales are nothing. Only if they had copied iOS the Samsung way in time.

Why? The problem isn't with the phones. The Z10 and Q10 are fantastic and BB10 is probably the best business-centric OS ever written. The problem is that the applications are just not there, and that people associate BlackBerry with reboots, battery pulls, and outdated, clunky software, even though that's not the case.

It's an image problem, not a phone problem. They can't market like Apple used to. If they could, they would get more sales, but their marketing is just pitiful.

"best business-centric OS" and there it is.

same idiocy as MS.

it's either user-centric or it isn't. BB catered to "business", but that meant IT. the users, managers, switched privately to iPhones. then demanded them from IT. boom, headshot.

BYOD is what kills "business-centric".

BB realized that, tried to position BBM as a user centric thing. too late. and schizo, as the playbook slogan "amateur hour is over" showed.

It used to be business-centric was enough.

Now user-centric is coming fast and hard to the business market.

To add on, it does not help that BlackBerry makes the application submission process difficult. I submit and update our 30+ mobile applications on Apple, Google Play, Amazon and BlackBerry. No experience with Windows yet. However, compared to those listed stores that I have experience with, BlackBerry is my least favorite.

I use the same binary build that I submit with ease for Google and Amazon, but BlackBerry tends to deny our application every once in awhile. Just figuring out how to navigate the application web portal to figure out why it was denied is a challenge. Why is it so hard to wrap the "Denied" text with a direct link to the reason as to why it was denied? Instead I need to crawl the page to find the reason.

Another trouble that comes to mind more recently is that they added some sort of additional min-os requirement for a config/manifest file with a cryptic error message that needed resolving before the binary was allowed to be submitted.

I would have thought it would be far easier to get apps through BlackBerry since they want more apps for their devices. Instead, I personally find getting apps for BB discouraging. Windows in the same space even approached and offered to pay us to develop an app for their store.

I'm sure that's true but I also think there was an inflection point where people who had Blackberry's didn't have a better option right as Apple and Samsung were coming out with much more complete phones (great hardware, software, and robust app stores). A lot of these people switched over to Apple/Android and never went back. Now it is just a question of Apple or Android and Blackberry doesn't even enter the picture.

I had a Blackberry Tour that I got in 2009 and had until 2011. By the time the contract was up a key was missing and the software was archaic compared to what was on the market. From that time forward I had no interest in ever going back.

I think the same thing could be largely said about Dell. They didn't care about quality until competitors came along and ate their lunch. Now they are trying to reinvent themselves and claim back lost market share which is just a very, very difficult thing to do.

It doesn't matter if their flagship phone that's out today is better than any mobile device that comes out in the next ten years. The customer has a grudge against them and decided they're losers. I could only image how much people would be for cancer if BB came out with a cure.

Or maybe it just isn't better? Or maybe it isn't better enough for people to endure the complete lack of platform ecosystem.

Ecosystem is everything. Android overcame that (remember when few of the top tier apps or services like Netflix were available on Android?) largely via the pull of Google services, getting enough inertia that the apps came. Blackberry...it wasn't and isn't going to happen. It just isn't worth it for makers.

Blackberry can't just make a device that is as good as the competitors, it has to be significantly better. They didn't do that.

Android started succeeding before it had an ecosystem. Establishing a viable app ecosystem actually took a long time.

The problem for RIM, Nokia, Microsoft and others is simple really: they fail to align their business interests with all the other stakeholders in the market. Explosive growth like Android's comes when you get a sudden synergy of different stakeholders whose interests all align. It's not one thing.

  * Customers want more choice in phone 
   (bigger screens, different styles, lower cost, etc.)
  * Carriers need an answer to the iPhone. Something where they retain 
    some tiny piece of control
  * OEMs desperately need an answer to the iPhone
  * Developers want something more open, with more control and less barriers
  * Media distributors want some other channel than Apple / iTunes

Basically, Android was a win-win-win-win for Google, carriers, developers, OEMs and customers, and it came at just the right time when all these needs were urgent. The common theme you see in all these other players is that they are not open, offer less choice, and they are trying to force others to cede control (license our software, no you can't have the source, no you can't customize it, etc).

I didn't say it is better. I said it doesn't matter if it's leaps and bounds better. Everyone hates them worse than The Devil and there's nothing that can be done about it regardless of ecosystem and devices. People just aren't willing to even peek, nevermind even giving it a shot.

You nailed it. You managed to perfectly articulate what I couldn't. The BlackBerry OS is fantastic, but people aren't willing to try it.

I hope the OS survives even if the company doesn't.

Not sure if I agree with copying bit (I believe they should have carved a niche 2-3 years ago as THE Android keyboard phone to have), but indeed on the phones sold. 3.7M in a quarter? There were 5M iPhone 5 sales during its launch.

Or used Samsung hardware in their device! ;)

I sympathize strongly with the people who lost their job. I don't, however, sympathize with the company that made their decision to go it alone despite overwhelming evidence that there isn't room for another platform. iOS, Android, the Web. That's it. That's all there's going to be for the foreseeable future in mobile. Even Microsoft is failing at this. How much evidence does a company need to see that their strategy was doomed?

It's classic innovators dilemma. BlackBerry could think of nothing but protecting their existing business, even with failure staring them in the face. They should have been planning more for the next phase of the company (whether that be selling enterprise servers or whatever else) and made a small, cheap, play at restoring their phone business (probably by forking Android).

"I don't, however, sympathize with the company that made their decision to go it alone despite overwhelming evidence that there isn't room for another platform."

- I'm confused. They were THE leading mobile platform. So they didn't decide to enter a crowded market. The market got super crowded and they didn't respond well. But I don't understand the "go it alone" unless you mean innovating too late to roll out a new OS that was touch driven vs BB keyboard.

They decided to compete on operating systems well after it was obvious that a 3rd operating system wasn't going to make it. Numerous companies had failed or were failing on that strategy already.

They were ALREADY on first place, what you are saying makes no sense.

Nokia always had a bigger smartphone market share than bb world wide.

>>Even Microsoft is failing at this. How much evidence does a company need to see that their strategy was doomed?

The BB, Nokia, HTC etc problem is one of cash /runaway. Nokia was almost broke and how many $950M loss quarters can BB take? Not that many. Microsoft can keep bankrolling Windows Phones for a decade waiting for iPhone and Android to make mistakes and no one will even question them.

Look at what they've done for xBox and Bing.

Aren't they losing money on Bing, and are basically break even on Xbox? I predict Microsoft will eventually give up on Windows Phone and probably the consumer market in general. The momentum is overwhelmingly against them, but of course they'll go down with the ship almost all the way. What they should probably do is maintain an Android fork.

I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but they have a reputation of throwing money at something for a long period of time and it succeeding.

People keep saying this, but there's little evidence outside of the X Box.

Yes, the main evidence is Xbox. Bing is an ok example. It has a little market share where Google dominates(I think around 15% to 20%). I think they would be happy to have that in mobile.

IE?

As long as WP adoption is growing (which is it) why give up?

BB can take 9-10 loss quarters (2.5 years) based on how much equity they have left. That's why they are looking for someone to buy them out.

I have built software for large BlackBerry customers and met with RIMM people before. 3 years ago, I had suggested they should create an enterprise-oriented Android phones, such like Amazon created media-oriented tablets. 3 years ago, RIMM was still the #1 in enterprise smartphone market, and they had great chance to succeed in that area.

However, most companies are afraid to compete on fair battle background (Android). So instead of one, RIMM chose to fight 4 battles at the same time, hardware, software, ecosystem, marketing, and it lost on all of them. Now it is too late to change the fate. RIMM management was too afraid to change (really really afraid). It is said when I met RIMM people, and saw they couldn't do anything to save the sinking ship.

If any new phone wants a decent market share they have to start with the developers - they are the ones who will carry it along until enough 2 year contracts expire to grow the user base. Blackberry simply failed on this front so it's no wonder they are struggling. They followed Microsoft's path of screwing developers which clearly was a bad move.

There is always room for new devices, though. If FF or Ubuntu develop the repertoire with the developers first they have a fighting chance. There are pretty much no companies left that can sell just on their history and existing fan-base alone.

>They followed Microsoft's path of screwing developers which clearly was a bad move.

Can you elaborate? From what I've seen RIM made a pretty significant effort to court developers to its platform - the users and revenue just weren't there, so it was not that tempting for developers no matter what RIM said or did.

I think the parent's mistaken BB7 with BB10. With the modern BlackBerry software, they made a hugely significant effort, way more than Microsoft did.

They included an entire Android 4.x runtime in their operating system, just so developers could take their existing Android apps and deploy them to BB10 with roughly 'one-click' worth of effort.

Short of re-writing every app on the face of the planet, I'm not sure how BlackBerry could have made it easier for developers to port or submit BB10 apps.

It's amazing what a killer the smartphone market turned out to be. Nokia. RIM. Microsoft are in bad trouble. Intel. who else?

Is Intel really in any trouble? They're got a huge dominance on laptop/desktop processors, no?

Desktops are a huge, but declining business. In laptops they already have serious competition in Samsung's ARM-based Chromebooks. Besides, laptops also don't grow nearly as fast as smartphones and tablets. In markets, it's the growth that matters most, not the current revenue.

Android runs on x86, and Bay Trail could put Intel right back in the game if they get vendors on board: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7314/intel-baytrail-preview-in...

Intel's Atom line has been announced circa the time of the original iPhone. Should I say more?

Intel is fine. They have such a huge manufacturing and capital advantage they can afford to lose time after time, whereas the likes of AMD and ARM can only afford to lose once. Intel will own the mobile space in a decade or so.

Could you define how "ARM" would lose, given that "ARM" is an ISA which has different licensing levels and is implemented by multiple companies (including some that are larger than Intel - Samsung, Qualcomm, Apple).

I understand all that. Eventually companies like Samsung will be forced to abandon ARM because they'll get a better power/performance ratio from Intel than they can produce in house.

Well AMD will make ARM processors as well. Hint: ARM Holdings do not manufacture processors.

From what I have gathered they have not managed the growth hiring people below the original level. A company with 12000 employes should be unmanageable because of bureaucracy anyway. After some point new people only slow you down. Hope the old core is still there and something will finally come out of this.

The juxtaposition of these two headlines on Ars struck me with some awe: "Grand Theft Auto V rakes in over $1 billion in three days", "Blackberry warns of near-$1 billion loss this quarter". Especially since they're more tangible 'billions' than the Instagram deal.

Good riddance. I was a fan, until I actually had to contact their customer support.

Bought an android right after.

A long time ago i said RIM is the new Nortel. I think I can continue to stand by that statement.

Nortel? Or Novell? I guess both apply, but Novell seems to fit much better.

He likely means Nortel, especially in the sense of it being the Canadian tech darling that fritters away its business into irrelevancy.

Press results from BB: http://press.blackberry.com/financial/2013/blackberry-announ...

Relevant Google Trends chart: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=google+android%2C+wi...

Blackberry's slide starts around October 2011. News search is a little more flat, but that probably reflects the fact that tech journalists like to compare the rise of one thing to the fall of another. Google search reflects what people are looking for in general, so it covers people looking up information on the phone and OS, not just news.

Oddly, Blackberry is still in the lead on image and shopping search. It was tied with iOS on youtube until recently.

Why "Google Android" instead of just "Android" (or alternately you could, I suppose, go with "Apple iOS"), because the latter much more closely mirrors what has happened in the market. Unless personal assistant robots have taken off corresponding with Android, I don't think it's being polluted much.

I tried to keep it to the most general term that still associated it with a company. It seems to be smart enough to pick up on the relation between android and the other terms, but the two graphs are still wildly different. I would expect them to be similar.

I'm not sure which way to go with it. Fortunately, you're free to tinker with the inputs. This is probably a more interesting graph: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=droid%2C%20lumia%2C%...

I think this is the most interesting (and telling) one: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=android%2C+iphone%2C...

There is also cisco ios, which would also feature heavily on the web I would imagine.

I just typed 'ios' into Google and didn't see anything pertaining to Cisco ios in the first 10 pages. In fact even the International Organization for Succulent Plant Study rates higher than Cisco for the search term 'ios'

I doubt enough people are searching for information on an enterprise networking operating system to overwhelm the volume of people searching for information on a major consumer mobile operating system.

True, but its more in line with ios the operating system.

Queue "bye bye Blackberry". They milked their corporate entrenched position for an admirable duration of time.

Now where will I have to go for a keyboard and an OS not by Google?

So is this it then? They're finally gone?

It will all be over, soon.

Inventory kills hardware companies.

It just occurred to me that BlackBerry is playing a brilliant strategy. This billion dollar writedown lowers the stocks so it can be taken private. Meanwhile, BlackBerry announces the flagship Z30 to get users excited.

Z10 hasn't been out that long, and already they're writing off stock? And Z10 is such an awesome phone, anyone who actually uses one loves it.

It could only be for one reason, to take the company private asap.

I expect announcement of a sale soon.

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