BlackBerry CEO Wants FCC to Make Developing BlackBerry Apps Mandatory
techcrunch.com
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Want apps? Try fixing half of that and see what happens.
And I never got the free device I was promised.
Let's say this hypothetical "API neutrality" proposal were to go through -- note the actual letter from Blackberry's CEO never mentioned the phrase "API"[1] -- then Apple might simply stop developing iMessage. Unless your hypothetical law forces them to make the API available and keep it available indefinitely to all comers, effectively subsidizing their competitors out of their own pocket.
[1] http://blogs.blackberry.com/2015/01/blackberry-net-neutralit...
Or they might find other ways to make Apple platforms more attractive, without forced bundling of service APIs and platform clients.
Today, many customers use Apple's Mail client to access multiple email services. Since iMessage competitors (e.g. WhatsApp, BBM) would face the same regulations, Apple would have the option of supporting multiple message APIs in their client, giving customers more choice among competing services, and giving customers more choice among competing clients on each platform. We have years of data on Apple restrictions on web browser rendering on iOS, they have many possible mechanisms to advantage native clients of open APIs.
Google play allows you to do this too.
I use a BlackBerry Passport as my daily driver, and although I have both native apps and sideloaded Android apps via Amazon App Store and Snap, a lot of my most regularly used items are mobile websites. Many companies have excellent mobile sites, you can save them as bookmarks to your homescreen, they pull in the favicon and look just like apps. You don't have to install updates for them or worry that they'll stop supporting your OS version or particular hardware, and a lot of times they're a better experience than the corresponding native (or sideloaded) apps.
[1] http://blogs.blackberry.com/2015/01/surprising-winner-of-htm...
No one should force any company anything. It's a company's choice to do native apps, web apps, or whatever they like. They are probably missing some part of the market by not developing for some platforms or not having mobile versions of their apps - that's their problem, and it makes them ripe for competition sooner or later.
And it's also very hypocritical for a company like Blackberry to ask for this kind of things after largely benefiting from being in position of strength for many years and doing NOTHING to drive multiplatforms support. Now that they are at the bottom, they "require" their platform to be considered for all apps. That's laughable at best.
I disagree with this for a couple reasons. (The first sentence is easy to disagree with but I won't engage it as a strawman and will assume you mean it in a very narrow sense).
The reason is that I don't believe that it's purely a company's choice to create native apps, web apps, or whatever they like. Please bear with me.
In economics there is a tactic known as 'rent seeking'. A simplistic historical example is the chaining off a river and charging a rent for whomever tries to use it for shipping/travel. The entity chaining off the river may become wealthy from rent collection, but they themselves have not added wealth to the system - they've merely controlled, captured and collected the wealth that always existed in a riven anyone could have floated down had there been no chain.
Instances of rent seeking get more complicated in reality. We can simulate that in our hypothetical by assuming the that the entity chaining off the river first deepens or widens it, or that they also start renting boats or put up lighthouses.
Some of these costs are a singular investment cost - i.e. widening the river, installing lighthouses - and it's sort of suspect that for a fixed investment one should be able to collect indefinitely from it (see parallels with the credit card processing infrastructure and ISPs). The entity can always point to their having widened the river as justification and a real conversation needs to be had about rent collection.
Other costs accumulate in an ongoing manner - leasing of boats - which may appear to be fair but it does not justify the rent collection from the chain and it adds the possibility of special treatment (i.e. through regulatory capture).
What the computing services industry has figured out is:
A.) One can develop, for a mostly fixed cost, software that is sold as a service (even if it could easily instead be sold as a commodity)
B.) That in place of chaining over a river one can develop a digital ecosystem to seek rent from - Windows was successful in doing this for quite a long time
C.) That the networking and ancillary effects of consumers can be used to magnify the value of the product - put another way that value can be extracted from customers non-linearly
D.) That on digital platforms vendor lock-in, contributed to by networking effects, can be used as an anti-competitive tool
Let's take competing with Facebook for example. If you want to compete with Facebook, even if you have a superior social networking website in some capacity, you will need to have profiles for a huge number of active people - but there are essentially zero practical and legal ways to bootstrap such a competition (the Google+ saga reads almost exactly like this). That is to say people only need one place online to socialize with friends and family - the personal social networking market doesn't support ten major competitors. Even when Facebook's brand is about as toxic as you can get and outrage is high (as it spiked this past year) there can only be one major personal social network and any transition must be a violent one. Traditionally, we would call markets where only one competitor can exist a 'natural monopoly' and we socialize them.
Similar things are true of application platforms. Microsoft was hit by anti-competition lawsuits not only for bundling software with its Operating System, but also for integrating applications into its platform to give first party applications advantages over third party competitors. This is extremely true of Apple's iOS store today. Moreover, Apple (let's keep running with Apple for a moment) has ultimate executive decision about what makes it into its app store and has used this to block applications from both Google and Microsoft (who in turn did the same).
These methods of gate keeping and rent-creating are extremely popular, and in fact have been brought up (in a positive light) at every VC meeting I've had. Investors will ask how you are going to capture the market, and smile when you suggest there are network effects and show how there in customer lock-in.
Blackberry has, at this point, been elbowed out of the market. Even if they have a superior phone they will have an inferior app store (even though Apple, Android haven't built everything in their stores). They can not get a better app market because they need app developers. To get app developers they need people to use their phones. They are in a chicken-egg-paradox.
These sorts of practices elevate first-to-market privilege to extreme new heights, and turn them into forms of rent-seeking; the platforms that are invented become captured by those who build them.
Blackberry is asking for recognition that they can not compete in their own industry. Not because they aren't able to build phones or write phone software or any other sensible reason. There is a barrier to the phone market for all but a few blessed companies.
So what ? This is what is happens when you do too little, too late. It's not that Blackberry was suddenly hit by a meteor and had no way to compete before the situation changed. They had YEARS of near market monopoly even when the iPhone was just out. They were completely oblivious to the whole Smartphone thing taking off. If you don't play, you can't expect to win the game or even have a fair chance at winning - you just make yourself irrelevant. It's like saying that it's unfair that you can't buy an apartment in Paris because the property was cheaper before but now you can't afford it anymore - so, dear Regulator, please make property prices affordable again so that I can buy my piece of land. It's nonsensical. Google and Apple built their position through major investment, and as much as I hate native apps on both platforms, it's their right to build their walled garden if they want to.
Blackberry has several options in front of them: 1) sell their assets and call it quits before they are worth nothing. 2) make Android phones like everyone else and focus on what they are good at (hardware?) and hope to survive with that. 3) Take a blue ocean strategy and make something nobody else makes. Like a phone that does not track you or does not leak your personal information to every application out there. Who knows, there may be a market for this kind of things too.
It's because there can only be one or two big app stores and so the market for phones - be it Apple and Google, Microsoft and Blackberry, or Samsung and Nexus. Duopolies are bad.
Telling the story from Blackberry's perspective ("the loser") or from Apple's perspective ("the winner") misses the point.
The perspective to look at this from is the consumer's vantage point, where more a more even playing field means more competition.
That's akin to saying "Okay, we found a winner - all OS sales will be to this one (or two - whatever) companies. Everyone else can compete underneath the vertical on the final consumer product of this mono(duo)poly but they can not compete to make a better OS/platform/marketplace/social website".
I mean, I think we both understand each other here. We both understand that there are companies that monopolize parts of the software industry, and prevent others from competing.
Can I try to say what I think you're getting at? I don't want to put words in your mouth, so please correct me if this is not right.
Your analysis, I think, is trying to say that there are other places that a company can compete when corners of the information industry are monopolized; and that companies can bide their time in an attempt to win the 'next big thing'; that the nature of the information industry and its companies is to leapfrog one over another by 'disrupting' the current paradigm and finding a throne in the next (wary, thereon, of being similarly usurped). In this analysis someone would point to competition being fair in the sense that everyone has some relatively fair chance at being the next big paradigm setter.
Maybe someone who believed that would say to someone like me that I'm looking at competition in the market on too small a scale. That I'm look at a fair phone market when soon everyone will be wearing smart glasses (or whatever) instead. Someone who believed that might say to Blackberry that if they want to be a top dog again they can't do it in phones - they have to go make some digital glasses.
If Blackberry merely wanted "recognition that they can not compete," they could put out a press release.
Anytime you write a letter to Congress that includes the phrase "must be mandated" -- as Blackberry's CEO did -- it's abundantly clear you're asking a new law.
Blackberry is asking for recognition that they can not compete in their own industry. Not because they aren't able to build phones or write phone software or any other sensible reason. There is a barrier to the phone market for all but a few blessed companies.
They are asking that legal action be brought to bear on the situation.
Any time one looks at the interaction markets and laws they will find that both regulation and the lack of regulation can unfairly benefit the few over the many. One cannot snub regulation OR deregulation of markets merely on ideology.
There is an implicit snub here: "Blackberry looking for regulation as a handout. How corrupt - they must not be able to compete because they suck and are looking for some other avenue."
I argue that the reason Blackberry can't compete isn't due to their 'sucking' (they may or may not 'suck'), but due to other fundamentally asymmetric market forces that favor few enshrined parties at the cost of the many who would want to compete.
I say this not as a supporter of BlackBerry (I've never owned a BB device, never planned to, and dislike them for backdooring their devices for governments).
Instead I say this as a consumer who wants real choices and real market competition, and as a techie who would like to see software compatibility at large.
And we have built the system to do it. http://platform.qbix.com
Does it? IIRC a lot of people wanted to switch to G+ in summer 2011 or thereabouts, and it was getting a lot of buzz. But, by the time they got around to opening registration to people who didn't know someone who worked at Google, nobody gave a shit anymore, and Facebook had had enough time to address most of the stuff that was pissing everyone off anyway.
I always got the impression that Google+ nearly had it, but Google fumbled on the rollout - not that they were unable to overcome networking effects on Facebook.
Larger point being made above is that it's successors of monopolies, like a kingship, not proper market competition with multiple simultaneous informed-consumer choice.
While I agree it would be nice to live in a world where everything is based upon an open standard, it's laughable at best for Blackberry of all companies to call for this. Blackberry dominated the market for years by locking other systems out, and just because they ported BBM to iOS and Android doesn't all of the sudden give them the moral high ground. If they truly cared about "application neutrality" or whatever term they coined, they should open the BBM spec and let anyone who wanted to build on top of that.
The example BlackBerry uses is Apple prohibiting the development of an iMessage client on any platform except iOS. While it's unreasonable to expect Apple to write an iMessage client for BlackBerry, it's also sort of unreasonable to prevent BlackBerry from writing its own client.
Another example that comes to mind is Google's treatment from Windows Phone, which arguably goes beyond simply refusing to write native clients for Windows Phone to active discrimination -- some incidents that come to mind are the degradation of Google Maps and shutting off the Windows Phone YouTube client.
In some sense, this is really just an extension of standard antitrust law. It's anti-competitive to use your dominance in one field (e.g. operating systems) to squash competition in another (e.g. browsers). The leap here would be to say that something like iMessages or any of the various Google services constitute a monopoly (or should be regulated as if they were a monopoly). In contrast, it's a little more palatable to extend this to something like net neutrality because many ISPs do effectively have a local monopoly or duopoly.
Anyhow, not saying that I agree with them, but I think the post is more than a simple please-make-other-people-write-apps-for-BB plea.
- companies like Twitter would be forced to allow 3rd-parties to write clients, and could kill Twitter's sources of revenue
- Blackberry could write an insecure client & harm Apple customers
Besides, isn't proprietary technology an excellent way to differentiate product offerings? Why must it be accessible on competing platforms and thus invalidate my differentiating value?
But requiring an open API (or at least not placing restrictions on an existing API) isn't conceptually all that different from requiring Microsoft to allow browsers other than IE on Windows, and apparently a lot of people think that's a good idea.
Wow. Download the service?
I hate to nitpick just one sentence when his proposal is so mind-bogglingly ridiculous, but can it be that the quality of the phrasing reflects the quality of thinking? Given the proposal, I'm afraid so.
By the time we hit TechCrunch it's being worded as, "... if a company makes an app for iOS and Android, they must also make a version for BlackBerry and all other operating systems."
Good link bait though.
I've recently purchased a BlackBerry Passport and i absolutely love the device, I have a OnePlus, Nexus 6, and a MotoG as well and the square screen format and the keyboard just take it home for me.
As far as internet browsing, reading, and light content creation goes the Passport is by far the best phone out there atm. It's also one of the first devices in which BB decided to put not only good but virtually top of the line hardware so you are getting a quad core 801 snapdragon, with 3GB of RAM and 32GB + SD card.
I would wish that the BB market place would actually get some love it looks like the Android market from 2008-9 where 99% of the apps are scam, malware, overpriced shortcut apps, and bible and point me to mecca apps.
Even the "built for BB" apps on the market tend to run worse than their Android versions running in the Android Runtime Environment. And since even Google Services can be ported to BB OS10 there isn't even an issue with apps that require Google Account/Play Services any more.
BlackBerry should pay developers to write apps for them. Not force hardworking Programmers to develop apps for them.
That's an assumption big enough to drive a truck through. In my experience, every platform needs custom support or hacks to fix little annoyances, problems and incompatibilities. You end up with de facto per-platform support even though you're using common tech.
To be fair, the iOS and Android platforms are far from perfect, but they have enough user facing features that consumers like that they gain significant distribution and allows companies to build apps at a profit.
BB need to build better products, maybe then they will see people want to work with them. This is just a CEO who doesn't get it complaining because he isn't smart enough to fix the problem he was hired to solve.
You should watch out, you are on the wrong side of history.
Chen is known in the corporate world as somewhat of a turnaround artist. Blackberry needed a turnaround. That could have been why it "made sense" for him, or perhaps the 80ish million a year there paying him.
Blackberry had a qwerty board on their phones long before anyone else and yet they decided to rely on being the only player in town instead of innovating. I hope Firefox OS takes over and the Blackberry CEO has no choice but to switch to it because of the great ecosystem.
Oh, okay, never mind. Free market for the win.
In any case, the concept of 'net neutrality', when applied to code, is 'open source'. It's not 'you must do free work for me', but 'here is the code without favouring anyone'.
Of course, this is just a publicity stunt to get people talking about BB.
This guy has the mind of a child. I develop for the platforms I want, if he wants rules like this, try communist Russia.
i'll quote mr. chen here, piece by piece: "...policymakers should demand..." --> children demand. policymakers (and i assume he means congress, which is the constitutionally-empowered entity that is able to make law in the united states) make laws. and laws are supported with the power of the state to do two things: tax, and kill (in fact, they are the same power). so what this means is "congress should use its power to use lethal force..."
"... openness not just at the traffic/transport layer, but also at the content/applications layer of the ecosystem..." --> net neutrality is about agnosticism. there goes that word again, 'to think'. here, it's about not thinking -- particularly not thinking about whose data is traveling along your pipes. but once you move from the traffic/transport layer down to the content/applications layer (or heck -- in a chaostheoryesque way, once you move up to the operating systems layer) the medium is the message! this is the equivalent of a declining myspace begging congress to force facebook to allow myspace users to interact with the facebook users. the medium is the message here: facebook exists because it is not myspace. trulia is not redfin. people started companies because they disliked the platforms available and they sought to build better ones.
"...Banning carriers from discriminating but allowing content and applications providers to continue doing so will solve nothing."
there is zero comparability in this last statement. content and application providers are built atop an architecture that is by its nature exclusive and discriminatory. service providers are defined not by what is within them, but what moves through them. which is to say: teraflops (&c.) per second of data moving from various points to another. applications on the other hand are defined by what resides within them. music (spotify: beats needs to allow us to stream music to its listeners!). videos (vimeo: youtube needs to let us share their videos!). games (counterstrike: why can't people play our missions as the master chief?! ¡¡¡net neutrality!!!). the list goes on.
make no mistake: this is one more step down a road that leads nowhere good.