After reading about it particularly "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry", I think guardiangod is correct, but also Verizon and, to a much lesser extent, the whole stock dating scandal. If Verizon hadn't been so gun-ho for an iPhone killer, Blackberry would probably of got to something like the Passport a whole lot faster. They needed to stay in their lane for a bit longer. Their market cap actually hit its max a year after the iPhone.
I wouldn't call RIM / Blackberry a meteroic rise. They start in the mid 90's and built up the products in a pretty smart way with each following the next until the total shift of the Storm.
The Passport was a phenomenal device, and nothing like it has been built since. Large square screen and big touch sensitive keyboard, but yet still super manageable due to its squat height... if there was a modern Android version I'd go for it in a heartbeat. Not great for watching videos, but it would be super for everything else.
> Not by default it didn't, but if you had any sort of technical know-how it was fairly easy to sideload it on.
And it was a super outdated Android runtime that ran like dogshit compared to the native BB10 apps.
Also, if you wanted any sort of Google Play services stuff, you had to have an app on a laptop/desktop to sign all your apk's the same and remove a specific check... and you'd have to do it all over again every time you wanted to update an apk with play services.
If you don't need many apps and are okay with a web browser that hasn't received updates since 2015 or so, then sure. BB10 can run Android apps with its embedded Android runtime, but it's limited to 4.2 Jellybean (from 2012), so a frustrating experience. The BlackBerry App store is still running, but it's pretty much dead, with zero new development. All apps are free now.
It would make for a great email + basic usage phone, but not for media consumption. And the camera's not great.
I used a BlackBerry Classic that also ran BB10 until December 2017, and I still pick it up from time to time and wish I could still use it. The Classic is unique in that it has three independent input methods, all of which work super well:
1. Touch screen: the BB10 OS is actually designed for touch, with fluid and intuitive gestures. Swipe up to go home, swipe up and to the right to go to the notifications hub (reverse the gesture to just peek), swipe left to pull off a screen layer to go back, swipe down from the top to view the settings pane (standard place for settings in every app).
2. Optical trackpad and hard nav buttons, just like on old BlackBerries. You can fully control the phone without touching the screen (great for when you're wearing thick gloves during winter). Works super well for a mouse pointer in the browser. The trackpad even works reasonably well in Android apps, which weren't designed for it (presumably, it piggy-backed on the accessibility focus stuff).
3. Hardware keyboard: typing experience is great—not necessarily faster, but super precise, and no pop-up keyboard getting in the way. Every app is designed with keyboard shortcuts in mind, and the OS makes discovery super easy, so stuff like [C]omposing an email, scrolling to the [T]op of the page, or scrolling to the [N]ext page in a PDF are single click operations. Modern BlackBerries also have great keyboards, but since they run Android, they have none of the shortcuts (except app shortcuts).
I still don't see how in any way Qualcomm was responsible for or contributed to Blackberry's downfall. No doubt that Blackberry sent tons of licensing money to them, but that didn't seem to hold back their crazy growth rate. Neither did it seem to contribute to their downfall.
I can't get into details, but basically I agree with you. The Storm...was a product of many compromises. But it's only the start of a series of decisions that...
I dearly wish someone would explain the whole idea of why Blackberry built the Playbook. It seems like a product that was so forced with such a confusing development story.
Not sure how much I can share without giving myself away but...
As an active participant in Playbook's entire development from (near) start to end, there were multiple reasons. They weren't good reasons (most of my colleagues had, eh, concerns which got override,) but they somewhat made sense.
What happened was that multiple teams (internal and external) screwed up, so much so that the thing's internal was completely redesigned half way through development ie. Switched to a completely different SoC .
As another poster noted, their power supplies were great. I still have a couple left around my house. They had to be great partly because of a design oversight....
To give BB credit, the playbook was a '1st gen' device for that category, it's really only when compared to Apple, an amazing company with so much to leverage, that the Playbook was bad.
If they could have taken more time, it might have been better.
But the Playbook product did effectively expose the lack of depth, talent and relevant experience at RIM. I'm ashamed to say.
I worked with a VAR when that shipped. They gave us some to try and encourage sales. It was a terribly slow device with poor battery life compared to iPad.
I still use the well made power adapter (Micro USB) that came with it to charge devices to this day. Kinda sad seeing that blackberry logo and knowing the tablet was horrible.
I've heard that the Playbook was actually in development before Apple's iPad was announced, and after that it got rushed out. I don't remember where I read this (it was a couple of years ago), so I don't know how accurate that is.
I worked at RIM during the rise/collapse and would indicate the issues were mostly structural, cultural, and competitive.
BlackBerry was a small company up against the #1 product of the era (iPhone) and a 'free' competitor. Both companies are basically #1 and #2 brands in the world. They have very deep experience in all things, channels, money etc..
We had no 'mapping team' really, Google had 100 people.
iOS is from MacOS. BB had this ancient thing.
We were just a tiny company that got clobbered, but frankly, BB was culturally more like 'motorola' than an advanced, well run entity. BB could not compete.
RIM started in 1982, not in the 1990's. The 'rise' was quite meteoric when they decided to put email on your hip, and added a phone.
That's a good question. Yes, margins are low for most phones, most of the time. And cheaper modem chipsets would help with that. But if everyone had cheaper chipsets... then the phones would be a little cheaper. But I don't think that would have changed the competitive landscape at that time.
There was a fundamental change in phone capability and interaction that really shifted the market, and made new winners and losers.
I was a die hard Blackberry (my business phone, using a private iPhone) user, the last one perhaps in the large corporation I've worked for.
Then the Passport launched, LOVED the format, best format ever squared and large screen, beautifully fitting everywhere though being larger, loved the TOUCH keyboard, loved the unified messaging but had NO F* network connection ever. Just could't be called or call others. A second Passport the same. Then one got dropped and it totally broke internally, the "steel frame" didn't help in any way, I assume it contributed due to its weight and momentum.
>Patent licensing fees were a big part of the equation, which led to inability to lower costs to compete.
Yes. OP asserted that too. Like OP, you haven't actually given a reason why. Here's some counter-arguments:
1) BB grew exponentially all the while paying Qualcomm licensing fees - why didn't it affect them then?
2) EVERYONE was paying the same licensing fees to Qualcomm. You couldn't build a smartphone connected to the cellular network and not pay those fees. So are you saying that it affected BB more than it affected Apple, Palm, MS, Samsung, etc. ?
BB phones, <= v7, are split between an internal gear without Qualcomm, and the CDMA capable stuff is with Qualcomm. So they would have to pay Qualcomm even for the phone with internal gear.
As to #1, around BBOS v5 and v6, when they were pretty much top dog, all the cellphone accounts that wants to use a BB pays a service-access fee, or a BlackBerry Tax that goes to the company. Enterprise companies that want their emails and everything else also pays for the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. They were practically the only game in town.
They didn't have problem then, because they were rolling in cash; just like how they didn't have a problem basically buying up Philips st expanding, or keep coming up with phone models even though there's no way that there's enough demand to actually absorb the production.
#2 on top of needing to deal with Qualcomm licensing fees, which often applied (as the article stated) on non-qualcomm phones, they basically freaked out after losing that lawsuit to the patent troll, so they end up overpaying for licenses (not sure who's the licenser in this case) to avoid getting hit with more patent trolls. The contracts for those licenses were quite hard to get out of.
By the time they were making the BlackBerry Priv, they don't have the SAF to juice their income. Patent licensing, Qualcomm and others, were disproportionally high, compared to other Android providers. They can't renegotiate some of them due to the contract wording. Being 1% of the market means Qualcomm hardly cared to give support, because Qualcomm is far more likely to help Samsung and other android phone, that pushed out far more numbers than BlackBerry did at the end.
It ends up being that they end up licensing their brand, because had they manufactured their own phone, they'd have to deal with the patent licensing contracts that they can't get out from.
There's probably a reason why OP won't be too forthright in describing why. I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
To add, the SAF is not just a pure BlackBerry tax. Without getting too deep into it, there's stuff that needs to be set up with the carrier, and that's why BlackBerry push was a true push back in the day, without the phone burning through both battery and data. And when this gear malfunctions, you'd know, because you're not getting push at all.
They sipped battery and data, and once that gear is setup, the SAF was very profitable.
Even to this day, email is not the same level of instant.
Blackberry had a meteroic rise and they collapsed because of iPhone and (later) Android.