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Comment by seunosewa | Hacker News Reader

It's not clear that there's anything at all that they could have done differently that would have made them successful. Releasing BBM on multiple platforms earlier would not have made very much money. Completing BB10 earlier would not have caused it to beat IOS, Android, or Windows Phone. The Playbook would still have failed to iPads, Android tablets, and Window 8 tablets if it was designed as a standalone product. I think they were just doomed, really.

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Sell high-end android handsets with blackberry apps and designs that are optimized for business use. Concentrate on other sorts of tooling beyond just email and IM in the mobile business space. Or one of a hundred other ideas that are more sound that what they actually did.

RIM innovated once and then stopped, but the world kept changing and passed them by.

Actually an Android handset with some really solid, secure apps and no consumer cruft (copy of some movie you can't delete, Blockbuster app, etc.) would have been pretty killer back when I had a Blackberry through work.

In hindsight everything is 20/20, but their survival hinged on their product strategy immediately following the original Storm device. Had they recognized that the original iPhone was being jail-broken to allow third-party developers to build apps/a following, their adoption of something like QNX would have come more quickly.

> It's not clear that there's anything at all that they could have done differently that would have made them successful.

Other than running their business more rationally to give themselves a better chance, I think that's about right. They could have been the third touchscreen OS, but they just didn't make it.

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