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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
"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.
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...
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.
Actually, Blackberry just thought they knew what the customers would need. Apple actually know what the customers would want.
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.
> 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.
I'm guessing the logic is that with a faster browser, you would load more pages in the same amount of time. I'm not agreeing with it, necessarily, but I do believe I use more data now with 4G LTE than I did with 3G.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Not a shill, but the following is a great read. http://www.amazon.com/On-Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Commodore/dp/0973864907/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1380580238&sr=8-2&keywords=on+the+edge+commodore
. .
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?
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.
I bought a deeply discounted PlayBook, and I think they did a lot of things right. The hardware was top-notch and the multitasking OS stood up well against Android and iOS at that point. If BB10 had been released a year earlier with proper core apps (email, contacts, BBM) and attracted top-tier apps, it could well have been a major competitor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Before Apple, they had one of the best mobile browsers. Today, it's the best on the market. Apple's browser, in contrast, is now years behind everyone else.
"The problem wasn't that we stopped listening to customers, [...] We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did."
Sounds an awful lot like Apple as well...
Really, Apple today looks an awful lot like RIM in 2008 -- except that they're doing even less. Apple has taken 'resting on their laurels' to a whole new level.
Can you predict what will happen to Apple over the next few years? I have a pretty good idea.
Required reading for internet skeptics
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
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.
...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.
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.
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.
Before Apple, they had one of the best mobile browsers.
And how many competing mobile browsers of note where there?
Today, it's the best on the market. Apple's browser, in contrast, is now years behind everyone else.
How is Apple's browser years behind everyone else specifically?
Lots of companies in lots of industries could have been "major competitors" if only they hadn't made huge strategic mistakes. Tautologies works exactly that way.
Probably not when they were making $20 billion in revenues at their peak.
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.
Ever used iTunes for MS Windows?
Or did Apple just convinced customers that they wanted what Apple wanted them to want?
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 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.
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.
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 :)