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."

Comments

What nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason Blackberry went under has absolutely nothing to do with it opening up the platform to the government. It had everything to do with the instability of their server infrastructure.

I get the fact that you guys don't want Apple to open up its platform to the government, but this story is downright dishonest.

If you want to do away with the government then go live on an oil rig. Until then, the government will always have more power than you would like. That's life.

Re:What nonsense

[Maury Markowitz]

"The reason Blackberry went under has absolutely nothing to do with it opening up the platform to the government"

Indeed. In fact, one can clearly point to the *exact second* where BB died.

You've all seen the 2007 iPhone "are you getting it" moment, right? Well when Lazaridis showed that to Balsillie the day after the intro, Balsillie somehow managed to utterly fail to understand that the technology was better. When Lazaridis pointed out they had a real browser, Balsillie's takeaway was that Apple had a better deal with AT&T. It was entirely viewed through the lens of carrier incentives. And that was something he knew about, and geared up to come up with better license deals. That they also needed a better phone never crossed his mind.

A few days later he was quoted in the Canadian press saying something along the lines of "Apple doesn't know phones". I knew they were dead.

BB got done by its refusal to adapt

[Dorianny]

As a 600 pound gorilla it thought it could dictate where the market should got and got a painful lesson by customers that decided that touch-screen smartphones was what they wanted in their pockets

Re:BB got done by its refusal to adapt

[BitZtream]

It wasn't touch screens so much as phones that weren't ridiculously over priced calculators.

BlackBerry devices have been technically inferior from a CPU/RAM/OS perspective since the iPhone was released. They were only cool before hand because no one had email, so the shitty ass crap that BlackBerry pushed was awesome because the alternative was no email (or windows mobile, which was effectively the same :)

When the iPhone came out with a real browser and email client, the only chance BlackBerry had was to make a REAL smart phone, not that crap that had less power and resolution than a TI graphing calculator.

Then Android landed ... and then there wasn't just one awesome smartphone on the market, there were hundreds ... (awesome compared to the BB devices if nothing else) ...

And they kept on with that shitty device that didn't get real email, got some fucked up version of a text email that they created ... wasn't even just the text portion of the message, some mangled version they created from html. And web browsing ... seriously. iOS has a full browser. Android has a full browser. BB had ... a text based browser?

It wasn't the touch screen ... lots of people wanted a physical keyboard and would have been fine with a smaller touch screen ... but they did want their fucking email and web pages to look like email and web pages, and for page refreshes to not be so slow they were visible draws.

The BB devices were just pieces of shit, and even at the end of their falling apart, they were still far inferior to the competition.

Re:Title

[PopeRatzo]

I'm English, title sentence makes my brain hurt...

I've taught English, and the title sentence makes me want to go to Vegas, shoot heroin, have sex with nasty hookers and then drown in a swimming pool.

My life has been for naught.

Re:Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really.

I worked at BB during all this.

BB got done in because iPhone was hot and shiny, but the feature set was laughable. It didn't even have copy paste! Unfortunately, Apple is good at convincing the first set of users to say the first generation product is great even though it's shit (first Gen iPad was shit too, didn't even have a camera). Then Apple fixes most of the screwups in the next generation model (copy and paste was added to OS 3) and because first gen Apple users said their shit product was actually great (because they bought it as a fashion/lifestyle statement, they pretty much have to) the users that buy for features come out of the woodwork.

It was this second generation of product that was really the issue. BB employees were right to laugh at the first gen iPhone, it was a total piece of crap. Problem is, Apple isn't dumb and they fixed the major issues. BB didn't see that coming, and should have. And instead we release the Storm, because hey, compared with the first gen iPhone, it's just as shitty.

Everything after that was a bad game of catchup until BB 10. By that point users ignored BB and were happy with an inferior product (BB 10 had features you simply couldn't get from other phone OSes and still can't get, and it even ran Android apps). Which is the second wave of other bad phones managing to outpace BB by quickly improving and already having a base set of users.

Honestly, it sucks, because now I'm stuck with a shitty Android phone, and BB has basically torn the BB 10 dev team to shreds. Not to mention that John Chen has decided that security is a bad idea. It's disappointing because at this point I feel I've had to take a step backwards from BB 10 to android because BB is toast. I suppose in 5 years Android might get some of the features BB 10 had.

TL;DR: BB doesn't react fast enough to customer needs, BB isn't willing to put out a shitty initial product and hope users like it, then fix it later.

Re:Delusions of privacy

[hawguy]

If the situation is as described in a recent statement attributed to Tim Cook, then this is a completely fake issue. In summary, that quote said it would only take a few man-months to produce the software that the FBI wants. If so, then it is barely conceivable the FBI lacks the resources to have created it already, and it is dead certain that the NSA (and foreign counterparts) already have it.

So why the charade? Evidently to make suckers (AKA you and me) think that there is still some privacy out here where the peasants live.

Also, perhaps because they've decided it's politically expedient to make Apple look bad with this juicy and loaded situation.

Creating the software is only half the battle -- they also need the signing keys so they can get the software onto the device.

Re:Title

[605dave]

“Some people have a way with words, and other people...oh, uh, not have way.”
  Steve Martin