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."'"
"We believed we knew better what customers needed (Score:5, Insightful)
"We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did."
Yeah, except Steve Jobs thought this too, and look where Apple is.
This piece is interesting as a historical account but, like all these journalistic articles on why something happened, it's all hindsight 20/20 bullshit. If you want to understand why you can't trust the press to really explain the cause and effect of events, I encourage you to check out this book: The Halo Effect [amazon-adsystem.com]. Tears it all apart.
Too much management (Score:5, Insightful)
As a computer engineering student at the University of Waterloo, I have met many folks who have worked at BlackBerry. Their problem is that they have too much management and not enough development. The entire company consists of tiny teams being micro managed and not coordinating with other teams. They would have done better with large teams, with one very busy manager. This is how every other large and successful tech company I have worked for has been managed. This is the key here, in my opinion.
Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, Blackberry just thought they knew what the customers would need. Apple actually know what the customers would want.
One trick pony (Score:5, Insightful)
Blackberry's business was built around mobile e-mail. Their transition from pager devices to smartphones brought along with it their original NIH, vendor lock-in strategy. They never *got* smartphones as flexible devices using open protocols because that's not how their business started and they didn't move fast enough to embrace changing market conditions.
Who were BB's customers? Carriers. (Score:5, Insightful)
When BlackBerry listened, they listened to the carriers, not to the end-users.
"How did they get AT&T to allow [that]?"
Exactly.
BB was built for carriers - just like Windows is built for Enterprise customers. That's who their customers were. And apparently those customers were wrong. That's the problem when you listen to your customers - someone else might be talking to a totally different set of customers.
Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't fall in to geek circlejerk trap that apple devices as shiny and pretty and vapid but un-functional. They are shiny and pretty and vapid absolutely extremely functional. Apple is the /king/ of functional.
We geeks can have a very very very warped idea of what functional is. Your laundry list of pet functions and features is not function. It's bloat. It's complication. It's wasted development time and money. Adding just one more feature increases complexity and cost in an exponential manner, not a linear one. Adding that FM radio, command line shell, and sweedish ball tickler makes the device less functional for everyone who's outside those function's use cases.
Re:Too much management (Score:2, Insightful)
Their problem is that they have too much management and not enough development.
Show me an engineer at any organization who doesn't think he/she is over-managed, and I'll show you one who was just promoted to manager.
Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need (Score:4, Insightful)
Blackberry's problem was that it didn't even think about average consumers. It had enterprise offerings, concentrated on the market, not realizing that there is a positive feedback loop between what you use at home and what you use in the office. By the time it figured out that iPhone had gained penetration in the enterprise precisely because people wanted to use the same device at the office that they used at home, they had lost their momentum.
Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need (Score:4, Insightful)
Licensing ActiveSync didn't completely undermine the enterprise need for BlackBerry. Ask a CIO what his biggest headaches are, I bet that managing BYOD is at or near the top of the list. And this is years after ActiveSync, according to you, solved all the enterprise issues of iOS. I agree that getting ActiveSync support opened the door for the iPhone to enter the enterprise but it was far from a silver bullet.
Apple succeeded purely BECAUSE of function (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as we all like to think we're driven strictly by utilitarian requirements, the fact is that people like shiny bobbles over dull functional ones.
This indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of what the iPhone was at launch.
And what that was, was simply the most FUNCTIONAL smartphone that existed at the time. But a huge margin.
Blackberry was more functional for email then, but that was it. For most other things for most users iOS was FAR more functional. Using maps was more functional. Web browsing was 1000000x more functional.
Even without the third party app support iOS enjoys now, the simple truth was that for the things most people wanted to do with a smart phone, iOS was more functional than all the other alternatives. That it was also shiny was utterly irrelevant, it just made it lots harder for others to catch up because they got lost in the shine and ignored the function (which remains true to this day, sadly).
Shiny things at best have a brief flare of success and then die. Truly successful products always have a core of solid functionality that brings people back for more instead of being driven away by novelty.
Simply moved too slowly (Score:5, Insightful)
When the iPhone was released, RIM should've *immediately* began creating a new operating system for their phones, and *paying* developers to make apps for it.
Their problem, as the article alludes to, is that they got so used to people paying for the Blackberry *service*, that they couldn't imagine simply making money on the devices and taking a cut of the app market. I'm sure it seemed risky, and it would've been.
But they had no choice, really. And now they're fucked. They deserved it, frankly. They had ALL the cards, and they blew it entirely. It's Netscape all over again, really.
Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need (Score:2, Insightful)
"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."
The problem was being brain-dead in the face of fucking facts.
"Consumers would say, 'I want a faster browser.' We might say, 'You might think you want a faster browser, but you don't want to pay overage on your bill.'"
To which I would say "I'm paying $30/mo for unlimited data. Make your shit work."
"'Well, I want a super big very responsive touchscreen.' 'Well, you might think you want that, but you don't want your phone to die at 2 p.m.'"
To which I would say "My friend's iPhone lasts all day no problem. Make your shit work."
Re:Uhmm...BlewBerry? (Score:3, Insightful)
Blackberry was killed by their failure to upgrade their infrastructure.
Do you guys remember when they lost all emails, not once but TWICE in a matter of a week? That was what got businesses to say "oh shit, this isn't something we can depend on" and get other phones working. I'll bet that they're still running all their services through that same fucked up server in Ontario, despite the failure they've had on the unit.
Once that seed of doubt got planted, compounded by the fact that people could start using their personal phones (i.e. free to corporate) for business, that was it. Stick a fork in them, they're done. The one thing they said they were good for they couldn't do anymore.
Of course, given that they were hilariously spied-on and infiltrated (not as much, but almost as badly as Nortel), who's to say if those failures were accidents or if they were pushed?
Re:Uhmm...BlewBerry? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if it were perfect, RIM's fancy proprietary network was not exactly getting more viable with age. Any deviations from perfection were just nails in the coffin.
Re:Uhmm...BlewBerry? (Score:5, Insightful)
they never were a world leader either. them being a world leader in smartphones either needs very clever defining of smartphones or very clever defining of what counts as "world".
they never penetrated certain markets, because they were tied to operators - their phones were never cheap enough to be world leader in unit numbers.
practically nobody bought blackberries with their own money for full price happily.
Re:Too much management (Score:5, Insightful)
It was reported that Apple works is a similar fashion - small groups of engineers working on specific projects. When you bring too many engineers in on a project the management overhead becomes immense. The difference was likely with the quality and style of management. The fact that Jobs was a control freak, semi-tech savvy, and personally interested in the products likely worked in Apple's favor. No bickering between different divisions of management when they know Jobs will send them packing - being the ass he reportedly could be. RIMs downfall likely comes down to poor coordination between different sections of management. They had plenty of good engineers at their disposal, but they were not utilized correctly.
One has to give Jobs some credit - he was obviously not in it for money or politics, he wanted to make stuff he thought was great. (And fortunately for Apple, other people also shared in his sense of style.) This differs from other CEOs I've read about in that they appear to be more interested in playing politics to their own benefit. They don't appear to be interested in making anything let alone doing what is best for the company. The next quarter stock price - that is the only thing that is important. (But one tends to only hear about the bad ones so this is probably is not an accurate generalization - although reading SlashDot sure gives one this impression.)
Re:Wild-eyed optimism will do you in every time. (Score:3, Insightful)
The rewrite problem was well known to those outside of the arrogance field, but again, who am I?
We don't know. You can claim you're anyone.
Re:Dealt with them early on (Score:3, Insightful)
Before Apple, they had one of the best mobile browsers.
And how many competing mobile browsers of note where there?
Today, it's the best on the market. Apple's browser, in contrast, is now years behind everyone else.
How is Apple's browser years behind everyone else specifically?
Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, no.
Marketing gets you in the door. Your sales pitch makes the sale. If it was all flash and no substance, you know what? It would've died.
You can polish a turd only so much, but it's still a turd. And the internet will call it out as a turd. No matter how much you market it, a turd's a turd and the internet will roast you for it.
Movie releases pretty much show this - you can see twitter the moment the first showing of a movie is done to see what people thought of it. No matter how flashy the marketing and advertising was, if it's a turd, you'll find out. Like say that Jobs biopic that was released. Hyped to heck and back since Jobs' death and publication of his biography, it flopped.
If the iPhone, or any Apple product is all marketing, and nothing behind it, the iPhone 3G would've been a flop because people who got burned with the original iPhone won't buy it again.
Heck, reactions to the iPad in 2010 were very negative. So much so that Jobs was willing to start discounting it if it didn't sell well. But it sold really well, because after the first people raved about it, others tried it and raved about it. Despite most tech press and mainstream press panning it.
And Apple's had their fair share of failures - including stuff like the tissue box G4 Cube Mac. It's very pretty, but no amount of marketing could fix the turds it was saddled with - it was expensive and had worse performance than a cheaper mac.