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Comment by mrcharles | Hacker News Reader

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?

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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