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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."'"
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.
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.
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?