Ex-BlackBerry Co-CEO Talks Publicly
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But that amount of change would have been suicidal for a lot of management, and would require changing the entire company on a relative dime. It's hardly surprising that they tried to muddle through and got crushed.
On hiring: Q. How did you attract talent to the small city of Waterloo? Jim: We found kids that were excited to come to the BIG city of Waterloo. Small town Valedictions. I love hiring them. Give them two years to mature and they'll knock your socks off.
On the iPhone début: Jim: Perhaps overlooked was the significance of having the exclusive deal with ATT. Steve Jobs used to describe the carriers as the "four orifices" - everything had to go through them. This partnership was far more significant than people realized.
On Blackberry: Q. What phone do you have in your pocket? Jim: I have a Blackberry, I read my newspaper every morning on a Blackberry Playbook. I love them both, and you'll have to pry them out of my cold dead hands if you want me to change!
A few things I wasn't aware of (from Jim): - In it's heyday, RIM (Blackberry) was the fastest growing company 5 years in a row. - There was a patent battle that nearly killed RIM (Blackberry) in it's early days, before they major growth (I would like to read more on this).
Great session.
The Storm was rushed out, as the article says, in part because RIM thought it had to compete where I don't think it had to compete. Now I'm no savvy analyst, but it seems to me like RIM got tricked into picking a fight on Apple's terms and lost terribly.
I can't imagine it happening. Enterprise IT isn't isolated from the rest of society (although it sometimes feels that way). When the rest of the world moved on to touchscreens, Blackberry would have been left behind anyway.
The reason MS made sure you could Windows at home "for free" is that it would carry to the business world (where the money is).
I find it very hard to remember something that went from business to the home market successfully.
Nobody wants their clunky office app/device to be used at home, what they want is to use their consumer app/device on the office which is usually better and easier to use.
The Personal Computer.
Remember that mainframe you have at work that can crunch right thru spreadsheet numbers? Now you can have that same convenience at home. And this one can play Frogger too.
Enterprise/business is merging with consumer phones.
Their mistake was not getting into the enterprise app market for iOS and Android. They still could since the software sort of sucks still (or maybe my firm is cheap).
It's worth noting that Apple is in the same position today as RIM only 10x or 50x larger but still vulnerable to a brand new device upending their entire company.
Although I can't talk about enterprise and business users, I was involved in a project targeted for government that, if released, would have made the Storm look elegant in comparison. The expectations of the government around the time of the biggest iPhone growth was that government contractors need to make hardware the same price as the iPhone, but meeting fairly stringent MIL-STD-810 standards.
Not only are devices aimed for government purchase going to be sold in smaller numbers than consumer devices, they have higher environmental standards (drop it in jet fuel and have it survive, let it sit out in a sandstorm, etc.).
Fewer sales and more requirements means higher costs, not lower, and the government was happy to simply buy five iPhones instead of buying one device that would probably cost 5X the cost of a single iPhone, and still get pretty decent lifetimes out of them.
The only way they could have survived was if they had started 5 years before and came up with the iPhone themselves, which wasn't going to happen. Faced with two bad paths, the path I would have liked to see them take is to accept defeat and organize the slow windup of the company over the next 20 years, returning as much cash back to the shareholders as possible. But good luck convincing a CEO to ever do that to their career.
And, obviously, their phones should run Android.
Government/military users of course have long been accustomed to using whatever device wins the RFP, but even there the change in how people use mobile computing devices had to be felt.
A low priced Blackberry with a nice keyboard for messaging and a decent camera to go along with the horizontal screen would have staked out an area. Making deals with pay-as-you go groups would have gone into an area Apple didn't go and Blackberry might have dominated. Horizontal screen and camera could be an advantage.
They tried to build an iPhone not a Blackberry.
It's as if RIM consists of hard core business people and hard core engineers, both wearing blinders while cheering each other on. There are no 'normals' to care about how one feels about developing on the platform, to care about initial experiences, documentation that doesn't frustrate. If it's like this at the developer level, who is there is care about the end user? If I was a developer on BlackBerry back then, I would have jumped on the iOS opportunity. Today, you can't even pay previous BB developers to work on BB, they have moved on and want to enjoy their work. The few sticking it out know they can charge pretty much whatever rate they want. A smart phone without apps is a dumb phone.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-the-rise-and-fall-of-blac...
A link to get around the paywall: https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Inside+Story+of+How+the+...
When the iPhone came out it showed how more personal a phone could be; of course everyone is going to want to keep their personal assistant with them all the time!
Many seem to think RIM competing in the consumer market was a bad choice but I argue that no matter what direction BlackBerry went after the iPhone's release they had no choice but to compete in the consumer market. Nowadays there are plenty of holdouts but it's getting difficult to find a place where you can't use your personal phone and have your work stuff on it but separated.
1) They should have embraced a decent appstore and given developers the proper tools to not just build great apps, but also make money (same thing happened to Nokia)
2) Yes, they rushed production of the Storm. They should have NOT tried to make BB OS more iPhone/Android like and focused more on #1
BB hardware, security and power efficiency is where BB is king. I really wish RIM would disappear and merge with Windows Phone. Nokia/BB HW + WinOS/Android would be a killer combination.
Their hardware was at the very least competitive with the rest of the market, and I believe they would still have great appeal to the niche of users that prefer physical keyboards today.
By simply adding the HW and disabling by default they would have appealed to geeks and devs; instead in 2006 we were importing at top dollars grey market nokia e61s from europe. (canadian dev here)
Because the local carriers were offering a variant of those phones without the wifi here.
Iphone with wifi was the paradigm shift, carriers are still reeling from this one.
They then got complacent upon the business side and then ended up going in a panic as they used the share price as a indicator and not feedback of how things were going and with that had extra delays in seeing what was wrong.
They also had some nice wifi VOIP features but telco's prevented those from coming live in 2007 and would of helped greatly for business and consumer side at a time in which hotspots and wifi was becoming fruitful.
This alienating of business users and many missed opportunities, for one being rolling there own datacentre box instead of an expensive bolt-on for microsoft Exchange would of opened up other non Exchange based markets more and also given a firmer presence and toe-hold in a company.
Sad part was I was working there upto 2007 and had chatted with a director (late 2006) about the alienating the business market chasing the consumer one and we know how that went. But still pains me how the management were more into being seen to be good than actually being good and with that was two types, those who were technical and those who were not and the latter sadly had more say and less ears.
Then the other big aspect that hit Blackberry would be 3G, on 2G they beat everything with their own data protocol optimised for low-usage and needing telco's to have there own server to handle the custom UDP packets, which upon a device you would find under the books, which was there teminology for protocol handler/translation upon the device. Now when 3G started the whole pulling emails become more easier, less need for high cost 2G usage, and whilst 3G not as cheap it allowed more saturation very quickly to reduce those costs and mature at a time just right for Apple in many parts as well as others.
Another avenue they had was blackberry connect which would run upon other devices (windows phones, nokia's and the like) which would handle the blackberry custome protocol to allow emails using as little 2G data as possible, this whole area was one they did not invest in and started cutting back at a time when things were about to change. Again more aggressive deals and less arrogance about position in the market would of done huge favours and they could of been the go to email provider of Apple and the World, but they did not.
It is if almost they went thru a phase of picking the bad decisions at the worst time and hd they rolled dice would of had better luck in direction.
Still, to admit failure is good for a CEO, albeit few many years late. But Jim was one of the better ones, managment wise.
What does share price as an indicator and not feedback mean?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/excerpt-ho...
(it's an excerpt from a book)
I don't know where they came up with that number. I'd believe 100% of users were dissatisfied, but there was obviously not a 100% return rate. That would mean every phone ever sold came back as a return.
The current URL makes you pick your city, etc, first.