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Comment by cwyers | Hacker News Reader

Stop making phones altogether. Focus on what they do well -- BBM and MDM solutions. Being an Android OEM is death by slow cuts at this point. Players who have a much bigger head start in making Android handsets are doing poorly. Even the big "winners" like Samsung are selling a lot of units at low margins. What's Blackberry got that every other Android vender doesn't? Don't say keyboards, Motorola's first Droid had a keyboard, there's a reason they haven't made a new keyboard phone since 2012. And those are slider keyboards -- nobody is making Android apps optimized for the screen size and ratio of a classic style Blackberry. Making Android devices would be throwing good money after bad.

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A lot of people really hated BBM and are happy to see the back of it. It was hard to manage as an internal service, and a massive privacy concern as a cloud one. MDM is very competitive if they're going to be an Android vendor, why would someone pay Blackberry when there are tons of competitors already in that enterprise space and already offering top notch MDM?

The problem is that back when Blackberry were big they had few competitors. BBM was one of the few services which could be used internal-only, and MDM was non-existent on most other vendors or operating systems.

Sorry, but to my eyes, if Blackberry made this their business then they would go out of business. A lot of the people who used to have the displeasure of managing this stuff don't want it back, and they will fight tooth and nail to keep that from happening.

I've literally seen wine opened when BES was removed once and for all.

PS - We no longer do MDM since users BYOD, all we have the ability to do is remove the company's Exchange archive (like deleting a PST on a PC). Plus it is encrypted anyway, so if they cannot login then they cannot review it.

Blackberry will be out of business soon regardless of what they do.

Pretty much. Throwing what little money they have at trying to sell commodity phones just hastens that outcome.

FYI BlackBerry is releasing a 16x9 slider phone later this year, which has fed into the Android rumors. The only glimpse BlackBerry fans have seen of that device so far looked like a Galaxy S6 Edge with a slide-out keyboard.

I wish Blackberry had a strong data firewall between Android apps and QNX apps.

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