BlackBerry's Survival Plan: the Internet of Things

jfruh writes BlackBerry's smartphone business is famously floundering, but the company isn't betting everything on its new retro physical-keyboard phones. It's also making moves into distributed, embedded, and asset-tracking computing for homes, cars, and businesses, which can all be lumped under the currently trendy "Internet of Things" buzzword umbrella. The company got a head start when it acquired the QNX OS in 2010, which was intended as the basis of a new smartphone OS but which already had credibility in the embedded market.

Comments

Re:Can they do it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it depends on the size of the company and more importantly the culture.

I worked at a much smaller company that did a very effective shift for honestly many of the same reasons. We saw the writing on the wall. Other (much larger) companies were stepping into our niche and basically wiping us out. We couldn't fight them and we knew it.

Much like Blackberry is doing, we looked at what we were actually good at, and shifted our business around them. Culturally pretty much everyone knew it was that or we were all out of work.

As the article says, blackberry wasn't always just about phones. They've got some other solid areas (not to mention infrastructure that probably makes even google drool). If their culture supports it, they can probably rebuild themselves around that stuff.

Re:and don't hook the little thingies up, either

[Shakrai]

You don't NEED it but I think it's GOOD PRACTICE to have it. Do you trust Windows enough to be sure that no one can access your file shares if they're on the same LAN segment? Do you trust your closed-source TiVo enough to know that the folks at TiVo (or a black hat) can't remote into it and explore your network if they're so inclined? I don't. Why does my TiVo need to be in the same broadcast domain as the file server that contains my complete financial history and e-mail archives going back to 1991?

I have three VLANs. One for completely trusted devices, one for untrusted devices (the Android phone sits on this one, incidentally) that need internet access, and a third one for friends/guests that wish to use my Wi-Fi. They do not talk to each other. There's no reason for them to.