Ex-BlackBerry Co-CEO Talks Publicly

RIM was a super-efficient machine for selling a story to CTOs, and that story required a device for people to carry around. That market is insignificantly small in comparison to the larger market of human beings; when Apple started selling to humans, there was one thing RIM could&#x27;ve done: blow their entire company apart and sell the same service without the handsets, by bringing the features that CTOs wanted from the Blackberry ecosystem to the world of BYOD.<p>But that amount of change would have been suicidal for a lot of management, and would require changing the entire company on a relative dime. It&#x27;s hardly surprising that they tried to muddle through and got crushed.

I was at this event. It was hosted at the Empire Club of Canada in Toronto and featured the two authors of Losing The Signal: The Spectacular Rise and fall of Blackberry, interview Jim Balsillie. Jim was excellent; gracious, humble, insightful, kind. These were my big takeaways (very loosely quoted):<p>On hiring: Q. How did you attract talent to the small city of Waterloo? Jim: We found kids that were excited to come to the BIG city of Waterloo. Small town Valedictions. I love hiring them. Give them two years to mature and they&#x27;ll knock your socks off.<p>On the iPhone début: Jim: Perhaps overlooked was the significance of having the exclusive deal with ATT. Steve Jobs used to describe the carriers as the &quot;four orifices&quot; - everything had to go through them. This partnership was far more significant than people realized.<p>On Blackberry: Q. What phone do you have in your pocket? Jim: I have a Blackberry, I read my newspaper every morning on a Blackberry Playbook. I love them both, and you&#x27;ll have to pry them out of my cold dead hands if you want me to change!<p>A few things I wasn&#x27;t aware of (from Jim): - In it&#x27;s heyday, RIM (Blackberry) was the fastest growing company 5 years in a row. - There was a patent battle that nearly killed RIM (Blackberry) in it&#x27;s early days, before they major growth (I would like to read more on this).<p>Great session.

I personally hold that RIM failed because it ignored it&#x27;s winning demographic (government, military, enterprise and business users) and attempted to create a device for the broader consumer market.<p>The Storm was rushed out, as the article says, in part because RIM thought it had to compete where I don&#x27;t think it had to compete. Now I&#x27;m no savvy analyst, but it seems to me like RIM got tricked into picking a fight on Apple&#x27;s terms and lost terribly.

If RIM&#x27;s developer tools now are an indication of what they were like back when Apple released XCode for iOS, I am not surprised how things turned out. I had to do the tiniest of an app as a starting point for someone else recently. Horrible IDE, compile errors in sample code that mysteriously go away if you mash &quot;run&quot; a few times, need to install support components but what exactly isn&#x27;t defined, documents where you aren&#x27;t sure right away what version of BlackBerry they are for. And when you find the docs, you find the writer is in love with acronyms. I decided very quickly I would never touch the platform seriously, there is no joy there. Also, if Objective-C is deemed &#x27;too hard&#x27;, what is C++ + Qt considered?<p>It&#x27;s as if RIM consists of hard core business people and hard core engineers, both wearing blinders while cheering each other on. There are no &#x27;normals&#x27; to care about how one feels about developing on the platform, to care about initial experiences, documentation that doesn&#x27;t frustrate. If it&#x27;s like this at the developer level, who is there is care about the end user? If I was a developer on BlackBerry back then, I would have jumped on the iOS opportunity. Today, you can&#x27;t even pay previous BB developers to work on BB, they have moved on and want to enjoy their work. The few sticking it out know they can charge pretty much whatever rate they want. A smart phone without apps is a dumb phone.

Did I miss something or is that &quot;article&quot; two paragraphs with a single quote which amounts to “With Storm we tried to do too much.&quot;?

BYOD has always been a huge thing but until the iPhone it was hard to justify because many phones simply contained your personal phone numbers and MAYBE email with no good way to keep company stuff separate (Windows Mobile was really the only one that did this...kinda).<p>When the iPhone came out it showed how more personal a phone could be; of course everyone is going to want to keep their personal assistant with them all the time!<p>Many seem to think RIM competing in the consumer market was a bad choice but I argue that no matter what direction BlackBerry went after the iPhone&#x27;s release they had no choice but to compete in the consumer market. Nowadays there are plenty of holdouts but it&#x27;s getting difficult to find a place where you can&#x27;t use your personal phone and have your work stuff on it but separated.

Here&#x27;s how I think they failed:<p>1) They should have embraced a decent appstore and given developers the proper tools to not just build great apps, but also make money (same thing happened to Nokia)<p>2) Yes, they rushed production of the Storm. They should have NOT tried to make BB OS more iPhone&#x2F;Android like and focused more on #1<p>BB hardware, security and power efficiency is where BB is king. I really wish RIM would disappear and merge with Windows Phone. Nokia&#x2F;BB HW + WinOS&#x2F;Android would be a killer combination.

In a Dunkin Donuts, I once saw two strangers (strangers to each other) commiserating about the problems they were having with their Blackberry Storms and how much they both hated it and wished they had gotten iPhones. I wish I could say it was a revelation but I feel that the writing was on the wall as soon as the iPhone was announced.

I still wonder if their handset business could have survived if they had swallowed their pride and became just another Android vendor.<p>Their hardware was at the very least competitive with the rest of the market, and I believe they would still have great appeal to the niche of users that prefer physical keyboards today.

no wifi. Simple, very simple, bad business decision, to pander to the carriers.<p>By simply adding the HW and disabling by default they would have appealed to geeks and devs; instead in 2006 we were importing at top dollars grey market nokia e61s from europe. (canadian dev here)<p>Because the local carriers were offering a variant of those phones without the wifi here.<p>Iphone with wifi was the paradigm shift, carriers are still reeling from this one.

At the store, I thought the clickable screen was &quot;neat&quot; but would probably become annoying after a few days. 100% return rate confirms this. RIM had to know it was going to fail.

Who has a BlackBerry 10 device? <i>Not an attempt at sarcasm</i>

Problems were they ignored Apple and at a time in which they themselfs were moving more towards the consumer market with the perl and Bold models, dropping the nice easy to use jog-wheel which still can&#x27;t be beat for scrolling up and down fast with one hand, imho.<p>They then got complacent upon the business side and then ended up going in a panic as they used the share price as a indicator and not feedback of how things were going and with that had extra delays in seeing what was wrong.<p>They also had some nice wifi VOIP features but telco&#x27;s prevented those from coming live in 2007 and would of helped greatly for business and consumer side at a time in which hotspots and wifi was becoming fruitful.<p>This alienating of business users and many missed opportunities, for one being rolling there own datacentre box instead of an expensive bolt-on for microsoft Exchange would of opened up other non Exchange based markets more and also given a firmer presence and toe-hold in a company.<p>Sad part was I was working there upto 2007 and had chatted with a director (late 2006) about the alienating the business market chasing the consumer one and we know how that went. But still pains me how the management were more into being seen to be good than actually being good and with that was two types, those who were technical and those who were not and the latter sadly had more say and less ears.<p>Then the other big aspect that hit Blackberry would be 3G, on 2G they beat everything with their own data protocol optimised for low-usage and needing telco&#x27;s to have there own server to handle the custom UDP packets, which upon a device you would find under the books, which was there teminology for protocol handler&#x2F;translation upon the device. Now when 3G started the whole pulling emails become more easier, less need for high cost 2G usage, and whilst 3G not as cheap it allowed more saturation very quickly to reduce those costs and mature at a time just right for Apple in many parts as well as others.<p>Another avenue they had was blackberry connect which would run upon other devices (windows phones, nokia&#x27;s and the like) which would handle the blackberry custome protocol to allow emails using as little 2G data as possible, this whole area was one they did not invest in and started cutting back at a time when things were about to change. Again more aggressive deals and less arrogance about position in the market would of done huge favours and they could of been the go to email provider of Apple and the World, but they did not.<p>It is if almost they went thru a phase of picking the bad decisions at the worst time and hd they rolled dice would of had better luck in direction.<p>Still, to admit failure is good for a CEO, albeit few many years late. But Jim was one of the better ones, managment wise.

That&#x27;s just blog spam of the AP piece which itself is pretty short. There&#x27;s really no new insights here, just &quot;the Storm was rushed, it failed, so we gave up.&quot; That&#x27;s the entire content of the original article, a single short quote.

Whoever changed the link to the AP article, it is now broken...