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."'"

Comments

Uhmm...BlewBerry?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

So shouldn't they change brand to BlewBerry instead?

Re:Uhmm...BlewBerry?

[ackthpt]

So shouldn't they change brand to BlewBerry instead?

Too bad they weren't bought out by Microsoft. With Ballmer's lack of vision exceeded only by their own it could have been Ballmerberry.

comes pre-loaded with chair throwing app!

Re:Uhmm...BlewBerry?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Just you wait: if Qualcomm buys them out we can have BREWberry, the world's most hostile mobile development environment!

Re:Uhmm...BlewBerry?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:Uhmm...BlewBerry?

[gl4ss]

they never were a world leader either. them being a world leader in smartphones either needs very clever defining of smartphones or very clever defining of what counts as "world".

they never penetrated certain markets, because they were tied to operators - their phones were never cheap enough to be world leader in unit numbers.

practically nobody bought blackberries with their own money for full price happily.

"We believed we knew better what customers needed

[hype7]

"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.

Too much management

[mederbil]

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.

Re:Too much management

[willy_me]

It was reported that Apple works is a similar fashion - small groups of engineers working on specific projects. When you bring too many engineers in on a project the management overhead becomes immense. The difference was likely with the quality and style of management. The fact that Jobs was a control freak, semi-tech savvy, and personally interested in the products likely worked in Apple's favor. No bickering between different divisions of management when they know Jobs will send them packing - being the ass he reportedly could be. RIMs downfall likely comes down to poor coordination between different sections of management. They had plenty of good engineers at their disposal, but they were not utilized correctly.

One has to give Jobs some credit - he was obviously not in it for money or politics, he wanted to make stuff he thought was great. (And fortunately for Apple, other people also shared in his sense of style.) This differs from other CEOs I've read about in that they appear to be more interested in playing politics to their own benefit. They don't appear to be interested in making anything let alone doing what is best for the company. The next quarter stock price - that is the only thing that is important. (But one tends to only hear about the bad ones so this is probably is not an accurate generalization - although reading SlashDot sure gives one this impression.)

Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need

[e_armadillo]

Actually, Blackberry just thought they knew what the customers would need. Apple actually know what the customers would want.

One trick pony

[wiredlogic]

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.

Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:As Henry Ford said...

[Lproven]

> I remember thinking -- how are you ever going to
> type a message without keys? Well...

Wait, wait, I know this one.

"Slowly, and with difficulty," amirite?

Who were BB's customers? Carriers.

[mveloso]

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.

Re:Who were BB's customers? Carriers.

[CohibaVancouver]

...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.

A little understood fact is the iPhone's secret to success is Jobs managed to get AT&T on board.

Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Not listening to the customer.

[Dzimas]

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.

Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need

[wjcofkc]

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".

Delays killed BlackBerry

[Dynamoo]

The critical thing that killed BlackBerry was the huge delays in getting anything done. As the article points out, they spent a whole year arguing about their BB10 devices while competitors were eating there lunch, and when they finally got to market it was TWO YEARS too late. They'd been in a dead end for years with no strategy to get out of it.. and when they finally did the smart thing and bought QNX it took *forever* to get a decent working product out.

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..

Re:As Henry Ford said...

[mythosaz]

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.

Re:Wild-eyed optimism will do you in every time.

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Apple succeeded purely BECAUSE of function

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:As Henry Ford said...

[Beardo the Bearded]

I've had great link with Swype.

Sometimes you get the wiring wood but it works out in the end if your friends know you'd on your pigging.

Simply moved too slowly

[realmolo]

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.

Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need

[tlhIngan]

Apple sales have always been about consumers liking the product rather than being marketed to.

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.

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.