BlackBerry Never Had a Chance: Mobile Innovation Is Over | Hacker News Reader

BlackBerry Never Had a Chance: Mobile Innovation Is Over

wired.com

13 pointsghosh11 comments

"This could be the end of any radical innovation in mobile, period. Even Apple has run its course: Where else can it go?"

If the author can't think of anything innovative, then surely that must mean the end of innovation.

It's amazing we haven't internalized this by now. 70 years after Thomas Watson's famous quote about the world only needing 5 computers, we still have people saying (in effect), "surely THIS is advanced as technology can possibly be."

I had a stint of unemployment this last summer. After looking hard, I found a job at a factory. This factory wasn't the dirty and greasy factories of old. Instead, I worked on processing cell phones.

Phones came in, were stripped of sim/memory cards, sent to charging, then went to data wipe, then off to inspection (I was here), and then 2 layers of QA.

My job entailed in making sure there was no user data on the phones, nor were there memory/sim cards in the phones. We also had to classify damage as well. And I had to do 350 phones in a 10 hour shift. So I saw a _LOT_ of phones. These ranged from junky feature phones to the newest of new phones.

And you know what, I saw much more variation and 'cool' tech in the Androids than any other phone. There was that Sony Playstation phone. I saw a phone with 2 outside cameras to do 3d pictures.. And it had a 3d screen ala 3DS to boot. There was another android that was a square, perhaps 3 inches, and it folded out on a hinge and slid and created a rectangle 3x6. One model I will avoid is the Motorola Droids. They use a crap screen tech that leaves 'bullet holes' in the screen LCD, even with no other obvious damage. And I saw a LOT of these.

And then, I saw the Blackberries. They were annoying. The scroll wheel stunk. The touchscreens were the antithesis of sensitive.. not to mention the ones with the screen clicking on certain models. The browsers were absolute junk. Apps? You jest. You want to program it? Yeah right: have YOU tried using that devel suite? The media player was junk bolted on. Maybe they worked well when hooked up to a BES. Then again, maybe not.

As an aside, I went phone shopping recently. I had a old iPhone 3gs, which was unlocked and jailbroken. And it was getting a bit old. The home key was dying, but that's a fairly simple fix.

In the end, I wanted an Android. It's a much friendlier platform, and I can develop for it. But... which one? I knew I wanted a phablet-esque phone like a Note 2 (but not the $800 unlocked price... yeouch!). So, what was there? I wanted a high quality display, a good amount of ram, preferred a S-pen stylus.

I hopped on the Chinese sites to see which phones would work, and the prices associated. I narrowed down and finally ordered one from this seller:

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/new-arrival-in-may-6-Haipai-N...

I got it 7 days later, and it frankly kicks ass. It's one of the nicest Androids I've ever used. And I used probably 2000 of them at my previous cell phone recovery plant job. My only thing I didn't get was S-pen support. That was a bummer, but I think only the Samsung's support the S-Pen screen.

And it really is a monster size of a phone. The N7889 is sold as a Note 2 clone, but in reality nakes the Note 2 look small. It really matches the profile of a Galaxy Mega, with the exception that the flash is to the right of the camera. The real Mega's flash is below the camera.

Wasn't particularly impressed by this article until the last paragraph:

> The less time we spend obsessing over our shiny new devices, the more time we’ll have to use them for stuff that’s interesting, useful, important. Because in the end, what’s a smartphone but another tool? Sure, you can build a slightly better hammer — sturdier wood, stronger metal. But the real power comes in how you swing it.

That's an insight that resonates with me. I am one of those people that will shortly be upgrading to the 5S, but from a 3GS. I don't feel the need to upgrade to each and every new shiny thing, but 3GS to 5S is a worthwhile upgrade for me and I look forward to the new phone becoming 'boring' so that I can get on with using it for the day-to-day interesting, useful and important things, both from a user's and developer's point of view.

I also wonder if this article is conflating incremental improvement too closely with stagnation. Surely it is only the natural way of things for every large technological inflection point to be bracketed by periods of incremental improvement, which serve to fuel the next inflection point.

>He points to wearables such as Google Glass as one obvious category. But then he rightly says that such devices already seem a little boring — “remarkably like tiny iPhones bolted to our heads and fastened to our wrists.”

So Apple's iPhone compared to Blackberry's offerings was a paradigm shift that killed all potential innovation, but Google Glass compared to the iPhone is just an iPhone strapped to your face.

Not the most compelling analysis.

>This could be the end of any radical innovation in mobile, period. Even Apple has run its course: Where else can it go?

Almost egotistical how the author rests the lack of future innovation squarely upon his lack of imagination.

>Imagine a phone that could go for a month of heavy use on one charge, which, alongside other improvements, could give us constant location awareness we could actually depend on.

Maybe the author missed the announcement about the M7 chip, but that is exactly the type of innovation that allows for dependable location awareness. And longer battery life is an innovation that is currently in the works and will get there. Just because it hasn't happened soon enough doesn't mean nobody has thought of it and reached for it. That is being innovated. Now.

Also, Blackberry is responsible for Blackberry's failures. There were many strategies available to it when the shift began. It chose wrong and executed what it did choose poorly. Contrast that with Samsung, often derided for completely apeing and copying Apple and using Google's aped OS to do so. Quibble with that narrative all you want, but even adopting the most unflattering version of it, it proved to be a smart business decision, which, at the end of the day, is almost all that matters as they are extremely profitable and BB just gutted its workforce and may never make a phone again.

BB didn't fail because there were no innovative paths available to it as the author suggests. Not only is that premise wrong, but it assumes they had to innovate to succeed in the first place, which is also wrong. When it comes to execution and innovation, they failed on both counts.

I think the author had some valid points, but a better title would be "Mobile Innovation in Hardware is Over, for a while". There's still oodles and oodles of innovation to happen in software, both on the phone itself, and using the phone on a network.

It's OK for hardware to become more commoditized and 'meh'--frees up more time and energy for the software side of the house.

Companies (including BlackBerry) must innovate in different ways. To "think different" as Steve Jobs used to say. Moral and ethical innovations are long overdue. Innovations in customer service, innovations in networking.

Technology isn't going to save us and the planet, thinking and acting differently may.

Hopefully as batteries improve we can push into the new paradigms of compact wearable computing (watches, raspberry pi rings?) and augmented reality.

The premise that we're all done innovating is completely flawed, and there are no doubt entire companies yet to exist that will rule the market at points in the future.

why do all these bullshit pieces get posted and upvoted.

author complains about incremental innovation as not innovative, then offer better batteries as true innovation. same author does not see the iphone itself as incremental to the BB, Nokia Communicator and the other smartphones Mr.Jobs was citing on stage when launching the first iPhone.

and people wonder why journalism is dead. how do distinguish between a random neckbeard blog spouting nonsense and a "real" publication like wired? quality of texts is the same.

christensen's disruptive innovation book has been a great disservice to the world. now everyone babbels about innovation and disruption, with no clue what it really means. and guess what, DI is not a universal truth either, can't explain a lot of successful companies.

Wow, so innovation is only when something is so radically different that it's almost a whole new product category? Well then, sorry to 90% of the startups out there, but you aren't innovative. Other things that aren't innovative - new programming languages, HTML 5, electric cars, green energy, and everything else that doesn't involve Steve Jobs introducing a new product line.

I think this article sets up the wrong understanding of what happened at BlackBerry - the corporate structure wasn't setup to compete with Android at the low end and Apple at the high end. Another way to look at it is that BBY never had much competition in the smartphone space before iPhone and Android. That is to say, there were a few smartphones out there, and they weren't very good. BlackBerry was a novel product executed well.

iPhone and Android made email and messaging just another app.

BlackBerry, the company, was NOT designed to compete with the iPhone or Galaxy high end phones while competing with a plethora of low end Android devices. It grew up while competing with feature phones or smartphones with mediocre to terrible enterprise services. The whole company is structured around selling to companies and governments (like Microsoft). That means tons and tons of enterprise salespeople. Tons of corporate bureaucracy and overhead. You don't even have to look very far to find stories of the corporate nature of BBY hamstringing its efforts.

Case in point, BBY had a huge profit shortfall and so they are firing 40% of their workforce. How do you as a company wake up one day and realize that 40% of the staff to go? How do you run a company where almost half of the employees can be let go and not materially impact the business? If BBY is sitting on 2x as many employees as they actually need, then I have no doubt that is hamstringing the company and if nothing else it sets up the wrong cost structure for the entire business.

BlackBerry had a chance to compete in the high end - like Samsung and Sony do now, but instead they derided touch interfaces and took way too long to ship QNX on phones. What they have now looks pretty good, but they wasted like 5-6 years getting there. If it took Samsung, LG, Sony, or HTC 5 years to ship a competitive device we'd be seeing the same story play out. Case in point, Nokia. It took them like 4 years to make a real competitor to the iPhone, then they switched everything to Windows Phone, now they are being sold for pennies on the dollar.

It is ridiculous to blame the lack of mobile innovation for BlackBerry's demise, but the truth is BlackBerry's bloated structure and inability to even keep pace with the apparent "lack of innovation" in mobile technology killed them. BlackBerry's phones just weren't competitive with iPhone, Android, or even Windows Phone until very recently.

Couple non-competitive products with a terrible cost structure and bad management and you have a recipe for a business just waiting to fail.

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