How BlackBerry Blew It 278
schnell writes "The Globe and Mail is running a fascinating in-depth report on how BlackBerry went from the world leader in smartphones to a company on the brink of collapse. It paints a picture of a company with deep engineering talent but hamstrung by arrogance, indecision, slowness to embrace change, and a lack of internal accountability. From the story: '"The problem wasn't that we stopped listening to customers," said one former RIM insider. "We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did."'"
Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need (Score:4, Informative)
Not sure if you're trying to be sarcastic and misunderstanding GP's meaning, or if you actually think the 5S's crazy high sales figures represent some sort of difficulty?
Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need (Score:5, Informative)
Blackberry thought they knew and were wrong.
Jobs thought he knew and was right.
Now Apple is at the height of their mobile success, a place BB once was. Only now they don't have Jobs...
Say what your want of him, the mind of Steve Jobs was the difference between the two companies. Regardless of the success of their latest release, in five-years we maybe be posting about an entry titled "How Apple Blew It".
Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need (Score:2, Informative)
Adding just one more feature increases complexity and cost in an exponential manner, not a linear one.
If adding features increases complexity and cost in an exponential manner, it's an indication that you don't have proper separation of concerns.
Because that's where the extra cost comes from, integrating things together.
Re:As Henry Ford said... (Score:5, Informative)
I resisted virtual keyboards. It was natural, I assume. I had resisted T9 predictive text before that.
Today's good keyboards, like Swiftkey or Swype (which I prefer), are great. Dragon is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was years ago.
I don't miss having a physical keyboard on my phone.
I don't miss having T9 typing.
I adapted.
You can too.
Re:Wild-eyed optimism will do you in every time. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a former BlackBerry OS developer; you don't know what you're talking about. The BB OS is still a cutting edge RTOS that was carefully honed for performance and battery life. In fact, QNX is worse in many, many ways.
When asked why the CEO made the switch to QNX, we were given a list of features. When informed that BB OS already had those features, a meek "I didn't know that" was followed by a quick subject change to restore the arrogance field.
If you want to call the Java Apps and the JVM old and slow, I'd agree. The rewrite problem was well known to those outside of the arrogance field, but again, who am I?
Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need (Score:3, Informative)
It's not working so great of late.
Apple sales have always been about consumers liking the product rather than being marketed to. Otherwise, Apple could not have marking that was simply showing the device running applications...
As for it "not working so great" you must have a mighty large rock you live under not to hear the results of launch day sales for the 5c/s...
Just because Android is also doing well does not mean Apple cannot do well too. And they are doing quite well indeed.
backward thinking (Score:4, Informative)
...but he was right. In North America, the *carriers* are the cell phone manufacturers' customers, not the end-users. In the USA, Samsung has something like six customers.
When dealing with gatekeeper like this, you need to understand there are 2 directions, you can push products through the gatekeeper, and you help the end customer pull things through the gatekeeper. The iPhone is more of a pull-through product. Of course initially, BBry was push product, but its success created a pull-dynamic (employees kind of demanded it because their buddies in other companies had one and it was somewhat of a status symbol). I think somehow BBry forgot that lesson and decided to mostly focus their message on the corporate CIO gatekeepers (since it's easier to track from a business account salesperson bean-counter perspective) and tried to simply push their products through them taking for granted that it was the pull-side that really made them successful and they needed to foster that as well.
A little understood fact is the iPhone's secret to success is Jobs managed to get AT&T on board.
I don't know that it was little understood. Way back then, wired ran an interesting article [wired.com] on it. Here are some interesting excerpts...
Apple was prepared to consider an exclusive arrangement to get that deal done. But Apple was also prepared to buy wireless minutes wholesale and become a de facto carrier itself... For Cingular, Apple's ambitions were both tantalizing and nerve-racking. A cozy relationship with the maker of the iPod would bring sex appeal to the company's brand. And some other carrier was sure to sign with Jobs if Cingular turned him down — Jobs made it clear that he would shop his idea to anyone who would listen.
Sigman's team made a simple bet: The iPhone would result in a surge of data traffic that would more than make up for any revenue it lost on content deals.... It may appear that the carriers' nightmares have been realized, that the iPhone has given all the power to consumers, developers, and manufacturers, while turning wireless networks into dumb pipes. But by fostering more innovation, carriers' networks could get more valuable, not less. Consumers will spend more time on devices, and thus on networks, racking up bigger bills and generating more revenue for everyone.