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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."'"
Actually, Blackberry just thought they knew what the customers would need. Apple actually know what the customers would want.
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.
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
It probably didn't help that (at fundamental cost to battery life, and significant but theoretically solvable cost in fancy management) phones got powerful enough to just do email. No second set of not-exactly-mailservers in the loop (either for reliability or security concerns), on the corporate side you now need to sell a BES(and as the 'better than your existing mailserver alone' option rather than the 'well, do you want mobile email or not?' option), on the consumer side you need to sell a telco on giving you a cut of the action in exchange for a modest reduction in data transfer, and the handset customer on an increasingly uncompetitive device.
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.