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BlackBerry Launches Android Smartphone
wiredmikey writes: In an attempt to come back from the dead, BlackBerry announced plans to sell an Android-powered smartphone. The struggling Canadian smartphone maker said it would begin selling "Priv," described as "a flagship handheld device that will run on the Android operating system with BlackBerry security," expected to be available later this year. The company isn't giving up on its own operating system, and will continue to develop and enhance its BlackBerry 10 platform, which currently represents less than one percent of smartphone users.
They are 6 years too late.
*Offer not valid where prohibited by law*
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The closing sentence in the summary suggests that the BlackBerry 10 is a losing proposition because it represents less than 1% of the market.
The mobile phone market is so enormously vast that 1% of it would still be quite large, thankyouverymuch. Nearly everyone in the US has a phone. Let's use round numbers: say we have 300,000,000 phones in the US. 1% of that would be 3,000,000 phones. Each phone has an expected replacement cycle of 3 years, so the sales should be about 1,000,000 units per year.
Please show me a single manufacturer that would not be jumping out of their pants to move a million units a year. Heck, there probably aren't that many manufacturers that COULD deliver at that level.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
It basically boils down to arrogance. I was a IT consultant and went on site to Blackberry offices in the 2008-ish time frame. They were building new office space like a dot-com era venture funded business on crack and insisted it was all going up from there.The iPhone had come out and was eating the market alive and BB execs I talked to considered it little more than a fad device for consumers that would never penetrate the business market. R&D pretty much stagnated as they decided the BB was so damn good it pretty much could not be improved. But what really did them in was apps. Ever try to write a BB app? It was frigging impossible to get it done. The API was poorly documented and often just flat out wrong. There was the public API and a API the internal BB developers used that legend has was much better. I don't know how much I really believe that but I can tell you for sure BB development sucked. Apple had it right, make app development easy and well documented. As far as I know, BB still has not learned this lesson.
They have a vastly superior platform. Why toss that out for third-rate garbage?
Well, it's pretty simple really:
Android = profitable (at least for Samsung, they're making a killing)
Blackberry/QNX = unprofitable
It doesn't matter how "superior" your product is if you can't get anyone to buy it and you can't make enough money to keep the company going.
It seems to me they (and you) have made the classic mistake of thinking "superiority" will cause a product line to dominate the market, when in fact it's bang-for-buck which does. It doesn't matter how great your product is; if it costs too much and there's a much-cheaper alternative that seems almost as good, people are going to flock to that. That's exactly what happened with Android. Apple/iOS was there first, but it cost a small fortune (remember how much the first iPhones cost?). Then Android phones came out, they looked much like iPhones but were a lot cheaper (and also didn't have a my-way-or-the-highway bent like Apple devices), so now Androids utterly dominate the market, even if they aren't the most profitable. Then there's BB, which mainly just catered to government and big corporations because of the secure email tie-in, and they've been passed up by cheaper and more functional (in most ways) devices that have the whole app-store advantage.