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How BlackBerry Blew It
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."'"
So shouldn't they change brand to BlewBerry instead?
Ezekiel 23:20
Retired US Senate and Congress.
"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. Tears it all apart.
It's a boon for the industry to soak up these talented individuals. I just really hope they come and set up shop in the Kitchener-Waterloo region.
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.
I worked on some mobile e-mail product some 8 years ago. Call it a Blackberry competitor -- it ran on phones like the Palm Treo, Nokia E61 and various Windows Mobile devices. There was rumours of Apple making a phone -- and when it came out, it had no keys... I remember thinking -- how are you ever going to type a message without keys? Well...
'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." '
Yep, it's definitely Microsoft.
"knew better what customers needed long term than they did"
"arrogance, indecision, slowness to embrace change"
The difference this time is of course the RIM is a Canadian company.
That required them to write all of their core apps from the ground up, and they dramatically underestimated the effort required. The result was the disastrous release of the Playbook without an email client. Some say that the decision to release the Playbook instead of a BB10-equipped phone was also a critical error, but there's no way that the company could have released a phone instead -- it would have required some significant components that simply didn't exist when the PlayBook was first rolled out: a contact manager, dialing software, BBM, SMS, and of course email.
Commodore
I dealt with them early on. They didn't think surfing the web would ever play a major role on a phone, and thus put no energy into building a decent browser. The BlackBerry browser was just horrible even years after the iPhone was introduced. They didn't invest in the future.
Actually, Blackberry just thought they knew what the customers would need. Apple actually know what the customers would want.
He says,
I'm not sure there's a meaningful difference between "not listening to" and "listening and then disregarding" what the customer wants.
Also, I wasn't aware that your carrier billed you more for using a browser that loads pages quickly and remains responsive on modern sites. He is Canadian, though - Rogers must be even worse than I thought.
Doh! "knew" . . .
Right down to the resting on their laurels! Innovate or retire.
Maybe all their genuinely cool stuff was taken out back and shot before it saw the light of day; but I'm not sure (based on what they actually sent to market) that "We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did."
There are companies where you can clearly say "Wow, Company X is under the insane delusion that $SOMETHING$ is the future, all evidence to the contrary, and damn are they ever stubbornly shoveling that something into the utter indifference of the marketplace!" This isn't a compliment, exactly; but being a high-functioning delusive beats being a dysfunctional one.
Blackberry, though? The greatest compliment you can pay to their earlier years, and the greatest condemnation of their later ones, is that they seemed frozen in time, only worse. They weren't quite frozen (had they been, you'd at least be able to read your text-only communications and basic voice for a zillion hours with modern battery and silicon tech); but they never went anywhere. Their OS just got slower and more confusing as it mutated toward no particular goal, battery-sapping quasi-smart features were grafted on, cargo-cult style, to a system that never really made anything of them.
"The problem wasn't that we stopped listening to customers, We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did".
Believing you know what customers wanted or needed is not necessarily the problem. Customers don't always know what they want. Apple (or, it appears, perhaps just Jobs) made hay giving what customers evidently wanted instead of listening to industry pundits and market research to figure that out. The problem here was that Blackberry just didn't know what their customers wanted, and moreover, couldn't deliver in a timely fashion.
It's damn near impossible for a company to succeed with 2 CEO's.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
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.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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 world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Blackberry was the business tool.
Then they got drunk, maybe snorted a bit too much blow, and had no idea what the hell they were trying to do.
You don't shovel crap to appeal to the preteen market into a business tool. When you do, you appeal to neither business users, or the targeted kids.
Your developers flee; your competition's stores become filled with passable apps; and then finally your users say, "Eh, nuts to this clusterfuck of Exchange functionality and Angry Birds. I'm buying an (iPhone/Android)."
The rabbit hole is much deeper. Blackberry never considered any of Apple's users customers. That's the problem.
> Yeah, except Steve Jobs thought this too, and look where Apple is.
Difference is, Jobs was right. At least, enough of the time.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The didn't release new products, plain and simple.
"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."
That was Steve Jobs's attitude, also. Quote:
"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." -- Steve Jobs
Thus, he avoided relying too much on market research, preferring to lead his customers, rather than to be lead by them.
So why did this approach work for Apple, but not for BlackBerry? Or did Steve Jobs just get incredibly lucky despite his arrogance?
I'm sure that $600 Million that they had to pay to the paten troll NTP, even though the patent was invalid, had absolutely nothing to do with it.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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?
The IP will be sold off and that deep talent will find a more productive home. The good survive. The useless move to be chief executives elsewhere.
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.
The difference is...
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".
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
What was the fine they had to pay in the U.S. over a patent that was found invalid? $600,000,000 or so wasn't it? That couldn't possibly have acted to slow them down and screw them up in their biggest market now could it? Not to mention the money and effort wasted there not available for actual work.
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Blackberry could succeed on their name, if they tweaked their brand a little and adopt a more 'Samsung' approach. Their name is already synonymous with enterprise level email, service and solutions, so capitalize on that, just with a different platform.
This would provide end users with a standard Android platform just with more security features (maybe fingerprint, retina scan, whatever, and market it for security conscious individuals), and it would provide enterprises with a trusted platform.
Individuals will still get an Android platform with all those apps, and Businesses will get a platform that plugin into a standard Android ecosystem.
Anyways, those are my thoughts about how they could still make it work
BTW, Blackberry, if you're looking for a new CEO or VP-level manager to implement this solution, I'm available.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
I think Jobs took consumers to products they didn't know they wanted... yet. Blackberry seems to have simply started shoving customers over a cliff into products they didn't want or care about.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
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?
Sarcasm. The clearest way to make a simple point.
I was considering the Q10 (I like the keyboard) as my next device. BB had a good reputation about security, anfd not being a US company was definitely a pre, but several issues with the Indian and Saudi gouvernments had eroded that trust a bit. Then the links with the NSA came known. Combined with this: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/07/18/1249236/blackberry-10-sends-full-email-account-credentials-to-rim and I decided to stick with my Nokia E72 for the time being.
That phone also tries to snoop your email password (to use it with a discontinued service) if you setup your mail but I can easily overcome that by misttyping my mail provider and switching to manual input.
You simply have to be right.
And if it wasn't late.. it wasn't finished properly. Like the Storm. And then the PlayBook was both late *and* not finished properly.
Nokia found itself in the same dead end, but at least it had some sort of strategy when it jumped off the infamous "burning platform". I think that Apple is at risk of the same pitfalls.. they are a much more defensive, conservative company than they were six years ago. The only people who really seem to have a clue are Samsung, and they've got all the appeal of the Borg collective as far as I'm concerned..
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
the company I worked for in 2001 - 2005 trialled BES on Windows 2000 Server and Exchange $whatever, configured especially for BES.
In that environment, BES blew goats. It constantly locked up, lost email, required reboots of the server, etc etc. The company *ran* back to GROUPWISE as a superior alternative to BES.
With Hindsight anything is easy to predict with 100% accuracy. Apple, while on the decline now, picked that consumers wanted simple interfaces and trendy items and would happily compromise on features for that. Myself and many others thought apple was wrong at the time. Consumers are very hard to predict as Blackberry found out and as Apple are finding out now.
> Apple actually know what the customers would want.
No, Apple used to know how they could the customer make believe that he wanted what apple wanted them to buy, otherwise known as reality distortion field.
It's not working so great of late.
People are just stupid and easily distracted by shiny. Until they started sharing crypto keys around like a 2 dollar hussie they stood for something.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Deep pockets last only so long as you have cows filling !! R.I.Agony-erium !!
This might as well be how Blackberry, Nokia, and Palm blew it. And I'm probably leaving off a few companies.
IMO it all comes down to arrogance about your own platform. In Nokia's case that was Symbian.
Bruce Perens.
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.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's because the distortion field belonged to Steve Jobs and someone wasted the Mantle of Immortality on Santa Claus.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Seriously.
All the buffoons who sunk Nortel got snapped up by Blackberry, then RIM.
Then we have Nortel 2.0 a few years later.
I haven't looked into it but I bet this theory has some legs under it. Moral of the story - watch where you expand your management team from.
RIM's inevitable doom was painfully obvious years ago. They turned their phones and their brand into cheap plastic garbage going after the consumer market in a race to the bottom.
C'est la vie. Let that be a lesson to the MBAs. Too bad they burned billions and billions of private capital on the way down.
You tried to ignore the reality of the market away, got a totally inept CEO from germany that killed of much of the business and jumped ship with a golden parachute...
Jobs thought he knew and was right.
Not just Jobs though...
Now Apple is at the height of their mobile success, a place BB once was. Only now they don't have Jobs...
But they do have Ives, the reason behind the design success of the iPhone - and Cook, the reason Apple can build them to massive scale.
Apple still has both of them and shows zero signs of slowing down. It's true Apple is short one No-Man, but they carry on with others quite well because all of the people actually building new things are still there.
It's rather funny to me that Apple detractors have built up Jobs to be more of a God than any Apple proponent ever has.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
"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."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Blackberry thought they knew and were wrong.
Jobs thought he knew and was right.
This is incorrect: nobody "knows".
Every company put their bet on their own concept.
Jobs was simply more successful than Blackberry, and I don't think that there is a simple answer why, but it's mostly luck.
Now that Jobs is gone, let's see who will be more successful.
...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 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.
They under estimated how desire to have a pretty product would end up over ruling entrench security.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Once when Balsillie decided to spend two years trying to buy a hockey team, thereby taking his mind off the puck, and the other when his partner said "iPhone? just a fad". Pride goeth before the fall.
Not sure how thinking they knew what the customer wanted before they did is a mistake?
Pretty much every successful innovation-based venture that's ever succeeded made that same assumption.
Looks like their real downfall was just being wrong about the details. And probably being slow, arrogant, reluctant, etc.
If their main crime was anticipating consumer needs, they'd be Apple right now.
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.
This honestly sounds like most companies that I have worked for. The one that really grinds my gears is the lack of internal accountability. I hate it when a mistake happens and fingers start pointing in every direction. Then the person it gets pinned on is the one poor sap that didn't CYA even though it was clearly not their fault. Or, if someone actually steps up to admit a mistake, corporate america views them as weak and unworthy of the company. I have never understood how people in business want to get lied to, they just don't want to know they are getting lied to.
Apple, while on the decline now
While I predict this to come to pass sooner than later, it isn't true just yet. Apple was just ranked the world's most valuable brand, and recently broke sales records with the iPhone 5S and 5C.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I'd say Microsoft stumbled even worse than Blackberry.
Microsoft owned ActiveSync, Exchange AND Windows Mobile. They should have been what Android has largely become. They controlled the email server, the protocol and a usable (if retarded by today's standards) operating system with a bunch of handset makers building handsets.
It would have been TRIVIAL for MS by iteslf to own the smartphone market with those three things.
Blackberry was undone by boring phones and their relentless greed for BES licenses. Had they made BES free to use and direct-connect they might have even withstood a shrewd Microsoft onslaught. Instead they lived and died by the need to run a 1990s cell data network for profit.
The article describes some effort put forth to encourage the cell companies to stick with 3G, that 4G was a lark. See, that right there shows that RIM had NO IDEA what their customers were doing, who were, by that point, already betting billions on Wimax or LTE.
You can't in any sort of right mind expect to go to a Verizon or ATT about to spend BILLIONS on a buildout and tell them your commodity phone -which doesn't need that super expensive network- is all they need. This is like telling somebody buying a fancy car that a little putt-putt motor is all they need. No. Stupid.
If that kind of thinking represents RIM's general mindset, then they wrote their own epitaph years ago and only now are they finally realizing it. Or maybe they're in denial. I don't hear anybody saying "Wow, we screwed up!" only that the MARKET wasn't smart enough to choose the right phone. WTF.
Look, Apple has long TOLD people what they wanted to buy and gotten away with it because Apple, love them or hate them, comes up with some innovative reasons to back up this idea that Apple knows best and we should all just be quiet and buy it. There's a reason for the Apple arrogance.
At no point in RIM's history have they ever stood at that level where they could tell anyone what they should buy. They've never had that kind of appeal. Close, maybe. But it was years ago. Not now. Not even close. The problem is they lived in a feedback loop where they told themselves how important they were until they forgot to actually talk to anyone who wasn't working there.
FWIW, I work for a Canadian company which has grown by buying up other companies much like RIM bought and flopped QNX. The very same problems have hit us, hard. Three or four platforms running in different directions, new hires needed all over and none to be had, piss-poor accounts that barely contribute but demand lots of attention for dead-end products, and we've bled talent like crazy only to replace them with college students and possibly illegals. These folks can't DO what's needed. They aren't fixing the backlogs. They just answer the phone when irate customers call up.
I fear we're going to implode much like RIM has. The similarities are really spooky.
Sig for hire.
The Blackberry Playbook was frustrating to use in the most basic thing - the Home button.
I saw it for the first time on display at an Office Depot store. When I approached it, I opened an application, a web browser, and navigated to a few sites. Ok, standard stuff.
Then, I wanted to go back to the home screen, but for the life of me, for about 5 to 10 minutes, I had no idea how to do that. I looked all over for a home button that I could press. I tried to close the application; I tried to use different gestures, but I couldn't. There was no obvious button on top, in front, on the side, on the back. It was a moment of incredible frustration for 5 to 10 minutes.
Then, I looked at the front of the display. And at the bottom, was the Blackberry logo. Nothing about this logo screamed out "Touch me! I'm the Home Button", like the iPhone/iPad does.
Then through some miracle (or deductive reasoning, as there was no other button to press), I wondered if that was a touch sensitive button, or something. So I touched it. And lo and behold, it was. It was the home button. And it was camouflaged behind the Blackberry logo, as if someone new to the device was supposed to know it was the home button.
I was dumb-founded as I had wasted 5 to 10 minutes looking for it. And I was irritated that Blackberry would design something so non-intuitive.
So, in my irritation, I put the device down. And walked away. They had lost a potential customer forever.
I was interested in the Playbook as it was a cheaper device than the iPad, and Blackberry had a reputation of making solid phones. But those 5-10 minutes of frustration while I searched for the Home Button, was enough to send me running back to my "expensive" iPhone and iPad.
Blackberry must have failed to test the device with a completely new user. And that made me think, if they messed up on such a basic thing, then what else did they overlook. Turns out, they overlooked a lot of necessary things.
I'm still happy with my first generation iPad. It's a bit slower than my iPhone 4S, but it still can read my emails, browse my PDF eBooks, watch Netflix, and play Candy Crush.
And I'm waiting to hand $500 over to Apple again for their rumored iPad Mini with Retina screen. =)
Note: Admittedly, a touch sensitive home button is good, since it is not mechanical, and is less error prone to breaking. But I wish they had enclosed their Blackberry logo in a circle, or something, to make it appear like a home button.
I hope to god you're never put in charge of a large project.
Did your "average Blackberry" have "full" web browsing? Yes, I put full in quotes, to hopefully quell the "it doesn't/didn't do Flash" responses. It did work with 'regular' web sites, not only mobile versions/that stripped down HTML that didn't really take off.
Doesn't anyone remember the Palm Treo? They also sat on their laurels and blew it, long before Blackberry. In fact, their unorganized notes was so bloody good, I have yet to find as good list creator since.
Interestingly, the Playbook suffered the same critical failure as the Palm Folio: they forgot what business they were in. Their job was to make money. Instead, in both cases, some genius decided that the Plabook/Folio would exist to sell phones. The result was a crippled laptop.
By the way, I use the Treo sounds on my iPhone. If anyone wants the audio files, contact me.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Oh come on, Apple fanboys have an amazing ability to rationalize anything that Apple does. Apple could have come out with goddamn Windows 8 and the fanboys would be telling everyone how amazing Metro is, why tiles are are the future, how totally innovative and intuitive the whole things is, how totally awesome the colors look, and besides you don't need to run more than one application on the screen at once and you're a tool if you disagree.
It's more than that (although what you wrote is certainly right).
One of Blackberry's (arguably many) problems is that they failed to realize how the consumer market, being much larger than the enterprise market, could drive the enterprise market. As others have said, by going after the consumer market, by allowing independent devs to profit off the consumer market, and by having a reasonable development system, Apple attracted a boatload of devs and, therefore, features and functionality. Eventually, if you allow the features/functionality to grow properly, the consumer market is going to spill over into the enterprise one. (Side note: by "grow properly", I'm talking about Apple's tight control over the app store. As much as people may dislike it, there's really no disagreeing that the tight control has generally maintained an acceptable level of app quality. I don't think I could say that about BBW.)
Cool, I got a new bluetooth keyboard, let me just pair it with my blackberry which also has bluetooth. Hmm, HID profile not recognized? Blackberry only supports serial port profile bluetooth keyboards? Where do I get one of those? Nowhere, wtf?
Sarcasm. And I am somewhat expecting a similar crazy sale with the new iPads soonish. Not sure about the Mac Pro, but I will not be surprised very much if all those joking about the "trash can" design actually have been saving up money to buy one. I do think that Apple still knows what customers want. Which most likely is not the same what most readers here want (no surprise).
Perl Programmer for hire
"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. Tears it all apart.
The bigger problem is that they didn't come up with much new in the last 4 years, which is an eternity in the mobile market. The stuff they did come up with wasn't very inspired, or wasn't useful to their customers. Whenever they borrowed new ideas from their competition (which is not necessarily a bad thing), their implementation was inferior to the competition. Unfortunately at this point the survival of the company itself is in doubt*, which means that every company with the slightest amount of foresight will migrate away as fast as they can. You can't cut 40% of a white-collar workforce and be OK after that.
*Whether the company is in actual financial jeopardy or imagined financial jeopardy doesn't really matter. The result is essentially the same.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
For me the writing was on the wall for RIM when they stopped selling themselves as a business tool, and started flogging pink phones to teenagers.
I remember when Blackberry devices started showing up everywhere (and knew some RIM people at the time). They didn't sell because they were way cool. They sold because they did some things really, really well, and because companies felt that they were safe and secure.
Arguably BlackBerry was way, way ahead of the game in terms of messaging and mobile e-mail. That was what sold the things.
A smart Blackberry would have built on that with enhanced security, and with enhanced tools to make it easy for corporations to use all of that Internet goodness. I can think of a hundred ways that they could have built "got to have" tools and widgets that large corporations and governments would need to have.
And it's not all about anticipating touchscreens. If BlackBerry had been on the ball they could have defined a lot of the next generation of phone based operating systems, instead of scrambling to follow.
One other factor that I think has to be considered in all of this is that Canadian smartphone users are still hampered by insanely expensive data charges. My carrier now offers 250 MEG a month with base packages, and upgrading that starts at $40-50 a month.
If BlackBerry's engineers are working in an environment where data intensive applications are unwelcome it's likely that that would have influenced some of their decisions. Who's going to focus on video or even audiobook downloads if (consumer) customers can't afford to use them?
I'm still betting that a lot of the good BlackBerry ideas - including a real keyboard - are going to appear in some form of business oriented device. There's still a market out there, but no-one is filling it.
Three Squirrels
Well, the Windows phone has just gone above 10% sales in UK and France. And 9.2% in Europe overall. The Windows Phone is already popular in India, Brazil, Russia etc.
"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.
The difference is that Jobs convinced a certain class of idiot with a superiority complex that he was right and did know better than everyone else. Apple is struggling without him, because Apple is built on being a cult.
you should not go by first week sales. Apple have a hardcore base where they will always sell out early with there opening sales more an indicator of how much they can manufacture. What is more telling is the negative press on features and consumer backlash on IOS7 problems combined with their shinking market share. Just like IBM and MS though I don't think they are going anywhere soon but they are definitely past their peak unless they can find something new.
Ever used iTunes for MS Windows?
BYOD may well be the number one headace for the CIO, but the "new shiny" that the CEO just bought and is demanding that the IT group support is why ActiveSync was such a great stroke: the CTO cound not say "that simply won't work". He/She tried explaining how much work it would be to validate and get working, but because it could not be a simple story it did not pass muster.
Or maybe if they didn't squeeze money out of the BES licenses they still would have ended up where they are, only without having had their highly profitable years.
Revenue isn't everything, but it's fucking important. It's a bit glib to suggest that you can just forego a revenue source for the sake of strategic gain in market share.
Or did Apple just convinced customers that they wanted what Apple wanted them to want?
I feel like it's an intuitively obvious point, that the extra cost comes from integrating things together. For example, imagine if we didn't have proper separation of concerns at the networking layer. Every web app would have to worry about whether it was communicating over ethernet, token key, PPP or whatever. Integrating that into every single web app would be a nightmare, and the web would be much smaller.
You don't have to trust me or your intuition on the subject, though, Fred Brooks wrote about this at length in the Mythical Man Month. He said, "men and months are interchangeable commodities when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them." Furthermore, "If there are n workers on a project, there are (n^2-n)/2 interfaces across which there may be communication, and there are potentially almost 2^n teams within which coordination must occur." He also discusses the work of DL Parnas, building strong interfaces to separate concerns.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I received a Blackberry when I started at the company I currently work at, 6 years ago. At the time, I had a bog standard flip phone. Didn't even have a camera (wasn't allowed in the building at IBM). After using the Blackberry for a few years, I was interested in getting one for myself in part for internet access. Unfortunately the web browsing was horrible. Hard to navigate and difficult to manage my bookmarks. That's what had me reluctant to pull the trigger. I heard about the iPhone and finally bought a pair (Valentine's Day special) of 3GS iPhones. 32 Gig for me, 16 Gig for my wife (now ex and we're stuck on the same plan until she upgrades from a iPhone 4). Even though I hated the "keyboard", I still used it and kept using it up until a few weeks ago when I replaced it with an iPhone 5 (not the c or s, just the 5). Plus I'll replace the broken screen on the 3GS and use it to play music (iPhones don't bounce well even on carpet :) ).
At work we've replaced the Blackberries with a choice of iPhone or Android. I turned mine in for an Android based RAZR. It's a bit different than the iPhone. Still has a keyboard problem (I've ordered a keyboard case for my iPhone) which frustrates me to no end at times. I find I'd prefer to have the Blackberry back for work e-mail since I _must_ respond to work but I can take a mental break when the iPhone keyboard bothers me. While the internet experience was sub-par, I at least get my e-mail quickly and at the same time I get my SMS pages from servers. Heck, right now my Android doesn't even work at the office. Not the Android's fault. The carrier doesn't have an appropriate antenna/repeater in the building so I have to go outside to get e-mails. Which is not really a problem since I have my desktop (a MacBook Pro :) ). The battery power of a Blackberry far exceeds the Android or iPhone though. I only had to plug my Blackberry in once a week where the work Android has to be plugged in every night. The new iPhone can last a few days but the 3GS was down to a daily charge too.
So experience wise, I still prefer the iPhone for personal stuff and I'd really like the Blackberry back for work.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Now that you mention it, the awesome iOS 7 does have a distinctly Metro look... Microsoft must have copied them!
</sarcasm>
John
It's functional in the way a high-end sports car is functional. It looks great and can hit 200 MPH*, but it has no cup holder** (microSD cards) and only accepts a special high-octane fuel (no replaceable batteries). Every little thing Apple does costs more money than their competitors***. The iPhone 5s costs $650 and the low-end iPhone 4 is $450. If Apple released a $250 (no contract) iPhone, it might pick up steam against cheaper Android offerings.
The worst part is that their fanboys operate a cult where overpaying for Apple products is considered a good thing. Unbelievers are to be scorned.
*Does a cell phone really need a high-end CPU and GPU? Cheaper phones seem to browse the web and play audio and video just fine.
**Or accept a trailer hitch if that is your preferred analogy.
***I owned a Mac OS X computer. A new OS update came out every other year, cost money, and broke things when I refused to upgrade and new software required the newer OSes. I also felt nickel-and-dimed when I had to pay for an OS update on an iPod Touch. I went back to Windows because I couldn't take the gouging any more. Apple has haters for a reason.
the Mac version is worse...
A bit like Nokia.
According to Balmer, they didn't because they needed all hands on deck to deal with xp security issues and the rewrite of longhorn into vista.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
As Hagbard Celine had famously said: "True communication is possible only between equals." Inferiors will be rewarded more often for telling pleasant lies and get punished for telling unpleasant truths.
In the beginning was the plan,
and then the specification;
And the plan was without form,
and the specification was void.
And darkness
was on the faces of the implementors thereof;
And they spake unto their leader,
saying:
"It is a crock of shit,
and smells as of a sewer."
And the leader took pity on them,
and spoke to the project leader:
"It is a crock of excrement,
and none may abide the odor thereof."
And the project leader
spake unto his section head, saying:
"It is a container of excrement,
and it is very strong, such that none may abide it."
The section head then hurried to his department manager,
and informed him thus:
"It is a vessel of fertilizer,
and none may abide its strength."
The department manager carried these words
to his general manager,
and spoke unto him
saying:
"It containeth that which aideth the growth of plants,
and it is very strong."
And so it was that the general manager rejoiced
and delivered the good news unto the Vice President.
"It promoteth growth,
and it is very powerful."
The Vice President rushed to the President's side,
and joyously exclaimed:
"This powerful new software product
will promote the growth of the company!"
And the President looked upon the product,
and saw that it was very good.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Plenty of people still use two phones, but its their work phone that is an iPhone. Compared to a Blackberry it's a hassle for IT, but compared to one of a billion Android phones...
I was watching a TV show where 'experts' were talking about saving old Blackberry. One pundit suggested mickeysoft buying them. The funny things was: they were saying it in the hopes of saving the old wrinkled berry. Clearly they weren't as smart or as well informed as reality would hope. Mickeysoft having gotten into a deal with Nokia to use windblows phone 7 exclusively, and when no one would buy it, mickeysoft says to Nokia "Its not our fault no one will buy your hardware", followed a few months later by mickeysoft buying their entire wireless division (as if *that* will help). So they want a repeat of Nokia. What little sales the old wrinkled berry has, windblows fone 7 will kill off. In hind sight, it might get 'mickeysoft golden touch' out of the heads of clueless pundits.
BB blew it when BB Desktop Manager began to crash my Apple...I wasn't the only one, I suspected renegade Apple employees undercover in BB. BB never fixed it. Desktop Manager is the only program which consistently crashed the Apple. I counted down the days till my second BB went off contract....and got an iPhone...and I'm not a fanboi I just wanted my device to synch again...like my Palm. Pity too, but I guess there is unemployment insurance in Canada. Failing to fix something as simple as getting an Apple to work is unforgivable.
BB blew it when they installed government backdoors in their servers. Within weeks, most everyone that could, switched to other smart phones, since the other phones were already known to be better and the supposed privacy was the last thing that kept people using BB.
Hmm, and look where Steve is now...
It seems like the best scenario is for a company to actually know what customers need long-term better than they (the customers) do. Customers don't always know what they really want. They know they want some things, but those things may not actually be what would serve them best. You need to listen to your customers; you also need to ignore some of their suggestions / demands when they (the suggestions or demands) suck. I'm reminded of this:
http://youtu.be/Hvn9k8dnhjI
There is an old manufacturing truism that, contrary to what CEOs like to stand up and say before investors, your product development people should never listen to the customers. Here's what happens:
Manufacturer: What do you need?
Customer: We need X.
(Manufacturer goes away for six month, making X.)
Manufacturer: Here's your X.
Customer: Yeah. We needed that six months ago. Now we need Y.
Apple's genius was imagining products many tech people said would be failures but the marketplace snapped up. Apple was able make Y before the customers even knew they were going to need it.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
As a former BlackBerry user and a current Android user - I can say with certainity that ActiveSync on Android works. BlackBerry touts it's security but Androd ( especially after ICS ) supports a lot of those 'enterprise' features like remote wipe as well. I recently switched to an Andriod phone. At work we've moved to office365.com for our email needs. As you might be aware the email is offered via outlook.office365.com - which is basically a hosted Exchange server Since we're BYOD, when I setup my Android phone for Exchange ( http://office.microsoft.com/en-in/office365-suite-help/set-up-email-on-an-android-phone-or-tablet-HA102823196.aspx ) - the Mail app ( your standard Android "Email" application ) - asked me for permissions - whether I would allow it to remotely wipe my phone the Exchange server wanted it to These features were available only on Blackberry before ActiveSync came to Android ( and I believe the same goes for iOS as well ) - I think this is why BYOD works these days and provides some security for corporate data on privately-owned handsets - a win-win for all - other than BlackBerry, of course.
Apple has about 15% of a loyal fanbase who will buy an Apple branded spiked dildo and wear it daily in their anus and enjoy it with a grimacing smile. These are people who are likely to take a second mortgage out on their house if they think Apple might be in trouble, just to buy as many Apple products as they possibly can so that their idol may be saved. Go to an Apple store and you will see that I am not exaggerating; there will be at least one of these people in there.
There is about another 30% who thoroughly enjoy Apple products and have never had a problem with them, so continue to buy them. They will loudly toot the Apple horn, but will also often accept the problems and limitations of their favored brand without great deals of whining and screaming and gnashing of teeth. This is the primary demographic Apple markets to, and seeks to grow. With the rampant problems with IOS7 though, this demographic has receded considerably. After the IOS7 debacle, the majority of my iPhone using friends and colleagues have switched to Android, and it doesn't look like they're going back.
There is about another 25% who have never used other products, and thus don't actually know that other smartphones or tablets AREN'T iDevices. I've impressed many people who wondered why my "iPad" was so much faster than theirs, or why my "iPhone" had so many cool features theirs didn't. When I told them I use Android devices, they wondered why they've never heard of Apple's Android devices. Literally. Thankfully this demographic is receding quickly as well.
The other 30% is the tech savvy, who simply use the best tool for the job. They often have an Android device as well as an iDevice, and use both just as equally. I think most of /. falls into this tier, though there are definitely a few of the 15%ers as well.
18 months ago, I wanted to buy a BlackBerry that ran Android, but they didn't exist!
IMO, I think it would have made sense to test-market a BlackBerry that ran Android. I'd really like real buttons on my phone.
No, I will not work for your startup
Apple's success record has never been 100%. It just has to be better then average for them to succeed.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Actually, the iPhone on launch only did 3 things. Jobs himself kept pointing it out.
"It's a phone, an iPod, an Internet communicator. A Phone, an iPod, an Internet communicator".
The iPhone had something no other phone had at that point - a functional web browser! Before this, the only web browser that was even half decent was... Opera Mobile. Which you could pay $40 for, or if your manufacturer paid $10,000, Opera would port to your platform.
Of course, if you didn't get it with your device or pay for it, you usually got some crappy-ass web browser that was not much different from lynx. (Hell, that's provided you didn't get one limited to WAP).
Now we have a phone that comes with not just a web browser, but a web browser that renders just like a desktop PC (Opera Mobile came close, but Safari used the full Webkit engine, not a cut down one).
And that changed everything - I think Jobs loved to show off how functional it was with the rubber banding (patent denied in EU), pinch-to-zoom, and how the NYT website looked the same on the phone as it does on the desktop.
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.
An Android phone with suitably-configured VPN can give me unfettered access to my company's intranet too...
I'm still using my HP touchpad, now running Android. It's perfectly functional as a tablet, and some say it still has some of the best speaker quality of any tablet out there.
Apple is the /king/ of functional.
Really? Do you remember how long it was before the Mac finally started shipping with a 2-button mouse?
Nice try apple shill. Is that why Android uptake is still increasing and apple has flatlined in uptake?
I know several people who had the 5S on the first or second day it was out here in France. I can tell you with 100% certainty that the reason they bought the device was not because it is "functional". Sure, Apple devices are generally well constructed and have a very solid user experience. That does not explain the quasi-religious fervour that takes hold of these people when it comes to Apple devices though. Waiting up to several DAYS outside a shop to purchase a device that allows you to copy-paste? Honestly! And nor are the new devices perfect - one friend has admitted that his 5S gets so hot he has to stop using it. "why don't you get something else?" was replied to simply with a silly grin.
Being able to charge your device with a generic cable from pretty much any old manufacturer is an example of "functional". Hey, has anyone got an iPhone 5 charger? No, an iPhone 4 cable doesn't work, thanks anyway...
Apple knows how to create a feeling of desire for its devices that no one else has yet managed. They do this through marketing and fantasy, by making owning a smartphone like "being in a Hollywood movie".
I find it quite scary that someone responded to you saying "I hope to god you're never put in charge of a large project." and got modded up.
It's disturbing how many people on Slashdot really have no idea what the fuck they're on about. They really don't understand that failure to separate concerns is why complex projects, especially in the IT world, have had such a historically high failure rate?
Separation of concerns is essential for large project success, so someone suggesting anyone who claims someone who gets that shouldn't be working on large projects is themselves showing a complete and utter lack of clue about handling large projects successfully. GP is an example of why so many IT projects fail.
Indeed. The problem is deeper than daring to assume one knew better than the customer what the customer wanted.
Indeed, I wouldn't say that was a problem at all - all customers will want things in the future and really want something to fulfill those needs before they knew they had them. Blackberry thought they had a line on that, boldly went after it and turned out to be wrong. Happened to a lot of ex-companies.
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.
Very true, I got a great deal on a Lumia 720 for it's uber battery life, great driving GPS and touch screen that works through my thick leather motorbike gloves. During a comparison of smartphone battery life around the office, I mentioned I got three and a half days out of my battery. No-one believed me so I broke out the battery meter and many an eyebrow was raised, except for one hopeless iPhone fanboi who said "well, that's because it's not a real smartphone, is it?" His contempt for my brand choice continues to astonish me, the phone itself perfectly meets every one of my requirements but it doesn't meet his expectations and that somehow reflects badly on me personally. Shiny baubles aren't just a personal desire, some people will think less of you if you don't value them as much as they do.
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.
This explains why organisers of religion have been such miserable failures.
Oh wait.
Myself and many others thought apple was wrong at the time. Consumers are very hard to predict as Blackberry found out and as Apple are finding out now.
Apparently you haven't quite learned the lesson yet . . .
http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/30/blackberry-claims-bbm-is-still-coming-to-android-and-iphone-but-has-given-no-timeline/
Apple put a reasonable user interface into place. Blackberry did not. The only thing BB has going for them, in my view, is the presence of a keyboard, but the UI just really, really sucks.
www.wavefront-av.com
I wouldn't fault you if you left for Linux. But... you went back to using Windows because OSX was too expensive?
Don't quote me on this.
I know its oh so popular to deprecate all religions and religious people these days, particularly on the net and even more particularly on websites like /. and reddit, BUT, Relgion has obviously filled a void in people's lives, served a social function, defined cultural norms for morality and generally been useful, in the past, or it would not be so popular today.
You may find the concept completely illogical and therefore dismiss it, but whether or not its logical is completely irrelevant when determining if Religion has been useful and functional for its adherents throughout human history. The answer is an unequivocal Yes! or we wouldn't be having this discussion :P
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Does anyone remember Novell? They absolutely dominated the network file/print space at one point. Everything from small business to enterprise had a Novell 3.x server somewhere. Their uptime was legendary, and the "works with Novell Netware!" stickers were an absolute requirement for any piece of hardware you wanted to sell in the corporate space.
And Novell was run by engineers, same as BB. Much like Novell, BB thought they knew better than their own customers what they wanted. Much like Novell, BB ran roughshod over developers. When Microsoft came along with Windows NT, Novell scoffed at it, much as BB scoffed at the iPhone. Now look at them. When was the last time you heard anything of importance about Novell Netware...aside from the SCO UNIX fiasco, that is? Novell is dead. Netware is dead. BB has been circling the drain for years now and they'll soon be dead as well.
This is something engineers never, ever understand: you cannot *make* your customers to like your product solely on its engineering principles. That will only get you so far, until another company comes out with something flashier, prettier, or marketed better. It might not be "as good" as your doo-dad, but *that does not matter* if people don't *think* it's as good. That's where the marketing types come in, no matter how much we despise them.
. 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.
And being someone who's been forced back into Android by buying a used EVO after having my iphone stolen, I can tell you that the FM Radio function is pretty much crap. And I live in the NYC media area which is not exactly a radio desert.
you should not go by first week sales. Apple have a hardcore base where they will always sell out early with there opening sales more an indicator of how much they can manufacture. What is more telling is the negative press on features and consumer backlash on IOS7 problems combined with their shinking market share. .
Judging from their sales record that "hardcore base" seems to have jumped from a few determined nerds, musicians, and graphic artists, to full fledged commercial userbase that may very well take over the planet. Apple isn't really concerned about not having the first in market share when it's the richest kid in the club. They're making a dammed good profit, and they aren't seeing any real decline in usage.
The Globe and Mail is an anti-Canadian newspaper and has always been anti-Blackberry, from what I can remember. I spoke to some of my friends about this and they said that G&M investors are mostly american. Don't know if that's true but it's been a while since I switched to The National Post. It's too bad because I liked the G&M articles on investment.
Not sure what that has to do with my point, which is that religions are very successful even though core beliefs have no substance.
Yeah, I am having trouble figuring that one out too. Maybe because people are thinking you can't always have perfect separation of concerns? Sometimes that's true, but more often projects could be sped up by doing better on that point IMO.
Or maybe there are just a lot of really bad programmers on Slashdot.........
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I think it's the latter.
A lot of talented older programmers on Slashdot seem to have moved on and a lot of those left now are either the ones who never went anywhere in life and are still bitter they can't just write everything in C by themselves and have no interaction with anyone else and fresh graduates or undergraduates who think they know it all because they just got an A in CS101.
Thankfully there are still some people here worth listening to though, so it's not all lost. You just have to dig for them a bit more than you used to I guess :)
They just knew better what customers need, but they never able to produce good device. Do anybody have who have not replaced their battery in 1 year ? and who have never given their device for servicing within one year ?
The iPhone barely functioned as a phone when it was introduced. Remember: "You're holding it wrong."
Yes, I remember that quite well because it was mostly incorrect. It turned out that most other phones also suffered from Death Grip. Solution - don't try to squeeze juice from your phone.
But also, it applied to the iPhone 4 - which was a number of years after launch... The first iPhone was fine as a phone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Adding that FM radio, command line shell, and sweedish ball tickler
(Channeling Micheal Cera as George Michael in arrested development...)
Heh, they /make/ phones like that? ... That's crazy! .. wait so where would people even /buy/ a phone that did that.
I mean, hypothetically. What store would they go to? Which one?
Blackberry's key problem is that they assumed the Z10 (Blackberry's answer to the iphone) would be a hit, and manufactured a gazillion of them, but by the time it came out in the US, most consumers had written them off, and not enough people gave it a try. It's actually a very good phone, with some nice features; most Z10 owners I know like their phones a lot. But that counts for little if people aren't willing to try it in the first place. Superb marketing (focusing on what makes the phone unique) would have solved that problem: enough people would have tried it to establish a groundswell of interest, but Blackberry's marketing was lackluster.
Ooh, back down to 2, with no replies? I see the BB fans are out in force. I guess the aversion to facts isn't limited to the company. I'm sure your petty gestures will save them! In the meantime, I hear there are some Amiga fans having cookies and punch in Building 3 if you want to commiserate.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
This article at Stratechery has some interesting points about 'disruption' and being 'obsoletive'. http://stratechery.com/2013/obsoletive/
But a big part of the main thrust is that the iPhone reduced both the BlackBerry and the standard candybar phone to APPS. It wasn't necessary to have a whole device that did just phoning, or one that just did messaging, you could have a device that did a lot more than that.
The iPhone wasn't cheaper, but it WAS better. It was a general purpose device in a world that previously basically just had single-purpose devices.
Anyway, the article is worth a read.
I think it's just confirmation bias and a patronizing eye towards whomever is perceived as inferior. Surely it's not really a sign of the Slashpocalypse to find two novice/mistaken programmers here. It's not like that was ever hard to do. Now, if on the other hand, Linux started becoming popular on the desktop.
IMO, they weren't wrong, they just weren't right enough.
I was quite happy with my Blackberry, right up to the point where I wanted an app to do something that wasn't already built in. It would be more than a little generous to call the BB ecosystem anemic. What little was available was half-assed, buggy, and hard to find. That's what killed it for me. My next phone was Android, and I never looked back. (I considered the iPhone, but I'm decidedly not a fan of walled gardens.)
One of the major (yet un-touted) innovations Apple brought to the mobile market was regarding the end user as their customer. Prior to the iPhone, every manufacturer catered to the carrier as their customer, customizing their handsets to suit the carriers' marketing needs. BB's twist was to actively market to CIO's in addition to the carriers. Apple was the first manufacturer to recognize the end user as their true customer, and optimize the end user experience (at the expense of the carrier or IT management experience).
You have a business plan right there...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
He was heavily involved in all kinds of New Age stuff, he clearly was aware about how cults work and I can't imagine that somebody with such obvious marketing acumen would not realise the advantages of building a following that would do stupid things in order to ingratiate themselves with the "cult" leadership,
Every time I see a fanboi celebrating that he has been shafted at the tune of $500-$700 for buying something which could be sold online more efficiently I shake my head in disbelief.
How low is the self-esteem of these people to need *that* to achieve a boost of their happiness?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
He spent *years* in the wilderness after the first Apple Macs probed a financial disaster. He was removed by the board when it became obvious he was going to destroy his own company.
Then he presided over the train reck that was NexT.
He certainly had a vision, but golly, lets not canonize him.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I don't even remember the evil protocols they used, but when people familiar with TCP/IP started to become SysAdmins one of the first things they did was to install the drivers to allow TCP/IP networking.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
First thing I thought of when I read that was henry Ford's quote about the customer would have asked for a faster horse.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)