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How BlackBerry Blew It

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the what-happened dept.

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."'"

1 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Wild-eyed optimism will do you in every time. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm a former BlackBerry OS developer; you don't know what you're talking about. The BB OS is still a cutting edge RTOS that was carefully honed for performance and battery life. In fact, QNX is worse in many, many ways.

    When asked why the CEO made the switch to QNX, we were given a list of features. When informed that BB OS already had those features, a meek "I didn't know that" was followed by a quick subject change to restore the arrogance field.

    If you want to call the Java Apps and the JVM old and slow, I'd agree. The rewrite problem was well known to those outside of the arrogance field, but again, who am I?