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What Apple Can Learn From BlackBerry Not To Do (informationweek.com)
dkatana writes: There is no shortage of news about the fight between Apple and the Justice Department to unlock the iPhone of a suspect in the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorist case. Apple can take a page from the fight BlackBerry had back in 2010 with some governments in the Middle East and Asia. At that time -- afraid to lose a lucrative business -- RIM [gave] in and allowed those governments to access its secure BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) service. The rest is history. If Apple complies with the Justice Department request, according to Craig Federighi, senior VP of software engineering at Apple, "[This software -- which law enforcement has conceded it wants to apply to many iPhones --] would become a weakness that hackers and criminals could use to wreak havoc on the privacy and personal safety of us all."
No I can tell you straight up what was wrong with RIM. You all went to the same shitty school. You all sat on the same shitty classes with the same shit professor. Waterloo is a pissant bullshit farmer town. FFS there is horse hitches all over the places, because yes, PEOPLE STILL RIDE HORSES IN WATERLOO ON.
You guys lived in a bubble. You all were so isolated from what customers wanted, to this day you still think the 1st gen iPhone was 'a total piece of crap'. No sir, every product pushed out the anus that was RIM of Waterloo ON was a piece of crap. There is ONE event that defines the cellphone market, and that is before the iPhone announcement and after. And RIM kept on shatting out pre iPhone sets AFTER the iPhone and wondering why people didn't give any shits.
The weak dual CEO model, the lack of any outside thinking in Waterloo was astronomical.
I have a playbook right here. Remember those selling for $600++ Canadian? Yeah, or the fire sale of $129 CDN?
BB10 only had a chance in 2006-2007. But the truth is that y'all had been suckered with your crap education thinking that QNX was going to magically save you, because your foolish teachers embraced RTOS's for the users, and QNX was from Ontario ergo it is teh cool.
But none of you remember using the iCON workstations running QNX, and what total crap it was. And somehow magically a shite user experence from 1998 was going to win the day in 2012?
Face it the half baked, half assed products (see anyone crying about not running BES anymore?) is what did RIM in. Frankly nobody liked their shit, and given the chance to jump at anything else that didn't suck, and blamo they all left.
RIM was a freak of nature, the owners had utter contempt for their market, instead thinking of 'serious business' but not understanding the key demographic of cellular phones is not business but rather teenage girls. A phone with no cameras, no mp3 features, and a shite internet experience surprisingly didn't sell at all compared to the 1st gen iPhone. Instead of realizing that the iPhone launch was the defining epoch of the market, RIM choose to double down on dumb phones, then buy QNX to do a hookers and blackjack phone that by then nobody cared about.
Priv is their only hope, but that phone should have been out back in 2009 at the latest.