Blackberry has made lots of phones with keyboards. There is nearly a billion dollars in inventory, much of it with keyboards, and they can't move that inventory.

The keyboard didn't just become hard to find, it fell completely out of fashion.

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.

Indeed. The problem is deeper than daring to assume one knew better than the customer what the customer wanted. The failure, I think, was that Blackberry had boxed themselves into a corner by marketing themselves as a business solution. Fundamentally it was a failure of marketing. Apple's genius isn't really the devices or the operating system, though they're pretty well done, but rather in being able to use that acumen to guide customer choices. 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.

In many respects the first iPhone didn't have much to offer over your average Blackberry, but it looked cool, and more importantly, was built on top of hte marketing and technology of the iPod. Apple already had a leg up in having produced a killer device and knew how to extend that to the smartphone. Basically, the Blackberry become the staid competitor, functional to be sure, but lacking the "hip" factor. It became like a snowball for Apple. More customers meant more developers, more developers meant bigger app store, bigger app store meant more customers.

You still see the Crackberry types not getting it. They talk about things like real keyboards, about BES and other enterprise tools. They all became irrelevant, particularly when Apple licensed ActiveSync, completely undermining the whole enterprise justification for Blackberry. Now you could connect to your Exchange email and calendar. Sure, maybe it wasn't quite as nifty as the BB one, but it didn't matter. iOS became like many successful technologies; good enough for certain tasks to eliminate any particular handicap from lack of complete functionality.

Microsoft has suffered a similar fate with its mobile offerings. Too late to the party, wrongheaded marketing that indicates that not only the engineers and dev teams don't get what customers want, but neither does the marketing team.

Android's route to success has been somewhat different. Rather than trying to out-hip Apple, Google has managed to get Android on everything from high end smartdevices right down to bargain basement devices. By seizing the low-end, it has gained massive penetration.

Blackberry and Microsoft simply don't have a lot of room to smack into the market, and for Blackberry, that really doesn't have any other product besides its phones and BES, there isn't any other monster divisions to keep the whole show afloat until there is some penetration.

The Fraser Institute is a right wing think tank. It's like calling the Koch's non partisan.

My wide is evidence that what you posted is a lie. That makes you a liar.

What I admired is how she opted to go to jail and serve out her sentence even though protested it. Yeah, she looks a bit cranky, but that took real backbone.

I can't speak to any other province, but here in BC we have Pharmacare, which sets up limits to what any person will pay for meds, and it is means tested. In other words, a person making $100k per year will have a higher ceiling than someone making $25k per year. There are also provisions, though you have to obviously prove it, for emergency coverage of drugs. This often kicks in when you suffer a catastrophic illness and require very expensive meds.

The report doesn't suppress anything. the "slow down" is nothing more than cherrypicking because 1998 was the warmest on record up to that point. In other words, take the same reading from 1996 or 1997 and your claim of slow down goes away.

The only coverup here is the Koch Brothers have a bunch of fucking retards like you repeating their lies for them. What's worse, a liar, or a moron like you who just repeats lies?

And yet nations erect walls and fences, put up rifle emplacements and arm their borders all the time to prevent migration. Christ, the US has crazies wandering the US-Mexican borders eager to shoot any Mexican trying to get into the US.

The US spends more on health care as a portion of GDP than pretty much any other industrialized country on the planet. Ponder that as you denigrate a public system and pump your fists for the US "model".

All I know is that I didn't go bankrupt even when faced with my wife's serious cancer and my own concurrent lay off.

Let me explain something to you. Canada is a confederation of ten provinces with clear separation of powers. And yet we still have the Canada Health Act. And there's certainly no lack of Federal legislation that the States have agree to.

So if I'm unemployed under your system, how will I pay for, oh I dunno, treatment for melanoma?

And what, you don't think the US system has a ton of horror stories. My run-in with serious illness was my wife's thyroid cancer, and the only real delay was because the initial symptoms aped salivary gland blockage. Within days that that specialist figured out that it was a probable tumor (initially they thought a carotid body tumor), we were driving to Victoria to see an ENT (ear-nose-throat specialist) whose specialization was cancerous tumors. She had surgery a few weeks later, which identified it as a thyroid tumor, and the big delay for removing the thyroid gland (total thyroidectomy) was that she had to heal sufficiently from the initial surgery.

Yes, there are delays and rationing, but really that happens in any system. In the US, in many places, rationing is basically defined by the size of your wallet. In Canada and other countries with universal systems, it's defined by utilization.

The public health system saved my wife's life, and other than her need to take thyroid replacement hormone for the rest of her life, she has fully recovered. Furthermore, I was laid off right in the middle of this nightmare, and the end result was that there was no bankruptcy or loss of our house.

I'll take the odd delay in treatment over no service at all or going bankrupt to save my loved ones' lives. If you like the American system so damned much, I urge you to move there.

Yes, the Provinces decide how, but the parameters are not all that wide, and because the system is in considerable aspects Federally proscribed, you don't see that much variance between Provinces. And, in fact, the Feds have on occasion flexed their muscle and have sent warning shots to provinces who have traveled too far off the line.

Here's the facts. I am a resident of British Columbia. I pay about $127 per month in Medical Services Premiums. For that I won't be given a bill at any hospital or any doctor if I have a medical issue. If I need a scan or some other diagnostic test, I will not be billed. Furthermore, if I end up needing healthcare in Prince Edward Island, I will still be protected.

People did try to call it Romneycare, but maybe the magic underwear made it less convincing.