Ian Austen has an interesting interview in the NYT with the Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, authors of "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry," that offers details about the emotional and business turmoil surrounding the collapse of the once-dominant smartphone maker's fall into near market obscurity. Most interesting is BlackBerry's initial reaction to the iPhone. "It was an interesting contrast to the team at Google, which was working on smartphones at the time. Google seemed to realize immediately that the world had changed and scrapped its keyboard plans. At BlackBerry, they sort of dismissed the need to do anything about it in the short term," says McNish. "One thing that they misunderstood is how the game had changed when AT&T announced its deal with Apple," added Silcoff. "BlackBerry had built its whole business model on offering carriers products that worked efficiently on their networks. The first thing Mike Lazaridis said when he saw an iPhone at home is that this will never work, the network can't sustain it. What they misunderstood is that the consumer demand would make carriers invest in their networks."
"One of the big reveals for us in the book was the enormous power wielded by carriers in the smartphone race," says McNish. "In the wake of Apple's ascendency, carriers have seen their clout and economic value significantly diminished as customers spend more of their smartphone money on Apple phones, apps and other content than they do on carrier bills. It is one of the greatest wealth transfers in our generation."
[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday May 29 2015, @04:01AM
there were lots of mobile applications before the iphone existed; Regan worked on a traffic jam warning system that ran on wap phones, quite a long time before the advent of the iphone.
She regards the key to the iphone's success as being due to the app store. Before that it was quite difficult for naive users to find applications for their phones. Commonly users were completely unaware they could install apps at all.
While I agree with Regan that the app store enabled the iphones success, my complaint is that distributing my product through apple's website promotes the SEO of apple's website and not mine. If you put a "get it at the app store" graphic link on your website, how many referrals do you receive FROM the app store, as opposed to those you send TO the app store?
Before the advent of the app store and google play, there were many other ways to sell software; Working Software was quite successful with direct mail for Mac OS productivity products for example.
Selling a product yourself, as opposed through the app store or google play, also means that you determine your own destiny.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by arslan on Friday May 29 2015, @04:23AM
You think in terms of yourself and what is good for you and your business, which is good but does not necessarily translate to maximizing profits - which most business would want (maybe not yours sure). In that sense, the best way to maximize profit is to maximize your customer base and pander to their requirements, not yours. Most consumers couldn't care, if they even understand, your point about SEO. What they do understand is how easy it is to get apps with the iPhone app store and the big void before Apple came along.
Btw, what is the size of the market Working Software was able to target? Success is relative, greed is not. If someone can profit at a global level and market to a target audience of more than a billion, why would they want to do direct mail distribution and target millions, especially when the logistical cost difference isn't all the big?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday May 29 2015, @05:34AM
the app store as a whole has a billion, yes, but very few individual apps reach that many potential customers.
Working Software grossed $3M one year that I was there. The largest drop that I know about was 250,000 pieces.
Consider that our business model worked really well for us, in that we earned much of our money by renting our list to our direct competitors. They rented their list too. While we depended on Apple to sell Macintoshes, we didn't have to ask Apple for permission to sell our products to end-users.
We also had unlimited free technical support. How many app store apps earn enough to pay for that?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by davester666 on Friday May 29 2015, @05:13AM
Do you really remember before the iPhone?
If you were a developer, it REALLY sucked. If you were a small developer [couple people], it REALLY REALLY REALLY sucked.
Most phones had a single version of firmware, the one it shipped with. Bugs didn't get fixed unless it made the antennae automatically come out and poke the user in the eye.
And every phone had a slightly different version of Java, with a unique bundle of libraries, along with a large variety of screen sizes and phone capabilities. Makes QA'ing a Android app look easy. Oh, yeah, the same physical phone will have completely different firmware and capabilities depending on which carrier you bought it from [at least in North America].
If you got lucky, the carrier would bundle your app on the phone. You generally got pennies per unit for this [and they weren't moving units like the iPhone now].
If you tried to sell through the carriers "app store", you were lucky to get a 70/30 split [70 for them]. 90/10 wasn't unusual. Same with third-party app stores [there were a couple].
You could sell it directly, of course, taking online payments was ridiculously expensive for small developers, as well as being ridiculously difficult to get people to even know your app existed. And then, someone wanting your app would have to hope it actually worked on their phone.
And then you needed tech support to help customers actually get your app onto their phone. They might need a special cable for their phone, or maybe create some method to download OTA [which of course costs the customer a bunch of money, and they expect it back if you can't get the app working on their phone].
Apple's app store revenue probably eclipsed all previous mobile revenue for apps within a couple of months.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Friday May 29 2015, @04:36AM
Or does someone at NYT have a massive hardon for iThings?
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by GungnirSniper on Friday May 29 2015, @05:09AM
Blackberry has made some huge mistakes, but they do make an OS that's about security first rather than tracking the hell out of you and being a conspicuous consumption item. They are profitable again, their latest phones can run Android apps, and they just work.
Too bad prior management was stuck in the past and drinking their own Kool-Aid.
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by Fluffeh on Friday May 29 2015, @05:24AM
Blackberry has made some huge mistakes
I think their biggest mistake was to try to keep their phones with a small screen and a tiny keyboard. Their phones might have been the "best" for business at the time and had they adopted the "all screen, no keys" idea when it first came about, they might have maintained some level of market share. The problem was that suddenly everyone made a phone that did the business stuff as well as their's, but also did all this other cool stuff... and it looked better.... and it could do non-work stuff well... and there were loads of games.... and there was a much larger display.... As soon as the consumer starts to see that sort of thing, they will go for it.
Things like "phone security" are very much like "plane safety". They are ASSUMED to be there in all products (by most people), even if they are not. That makes it very very hard to market a product with that as the selling point as it simply doesn't differentiate it from the others.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aclarke on Friday May 29 2015, @12:51PM
I don't work at RIM/Blackberry, but I live in the same region so I'm practically surrounded by buildings, employees, news articles, etc. I remember when the iPhone came out. I thought it was going to eat the Blackberry for breakfast, but I assumed RIM would take the threat seriously and up their game. All that came from RIM was a bunch of hot air about them not being worried. I assumed (hoped?) at the time that this was a public façade covering up a whole bunch of internal scurrying about, coming up with some revolutionary better products of their own.
When the iPhone 3G debuted as Canada's first iPhone, I lined up and bought one on launch day. It replaced an old Blackberry, and the difference was nothing short of revolutionary. Still, RIM was going on about how they weren't worried. It was frustrating to watch RIM plough along like a barge without a pilot, wondering what in the world they were thinking and what it was going to do to the technology sector in Waterloo and the overall economy of the region when they imploded.
I know there were a lot of smart people working at RIM, but when they finally did publicly react to iPhones and Android, what they released was really an embarrassment. They promised the world with BlackBerry 10, they promised all this great stuff with the Playbook, and then they released the Playbook without even an email client. BlackBerry 10 never made it to the Playbook. Their OS X connectivity software was terrible, when it was finally even released. Software updates were months late and buggy and missing features when they arrived. Why was a company staffed with world-class software developers putting out such third-rate software? I assume a lack of steady direction, poor management, and sinking morale must have had something to do with it.
In the end, BlackBerry seems to have landed more softly than I thought they would, although maybe they haven't truly hit rock bottom yet. Many of the smart people who used to work there have moved on to do good things with other companies. Office space rentals prices have probably dropped, but it hasn't cratered the housing market like I thought it might. I still shake my head in amazement at the incredible hubris by RIM's senior management as they sat on top of a huge mountain of market share and let it all wash away beneath them with their "what, me worry?" attitudes.
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Friday May 29 2015, @02:52PM
Rim/BB's first direct response to the iPhone, the full-touchscreen Blackberry Storm, was a colossal disaster. A friend went through 2 of them in a year, it was crash-prone, the UI was inconsistent and glitchy, and worst of all, they still catered to the dictates of the carrier and allowed them to block stuff like Bluetooth, and excluded wifi support.
That's right, no wifi at all. Data had to go through the carrier. In a phone model introduced almost 2 years after the iPhone was announced.
My friend almost left BB forever after that, but has amazingly stayed with them to this day. To be fair BB has improved their offerings a bit since then, though their QA on hardware and software still leaves a bit to be desired.
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Friday May 29 2015, @02:40PM
"Hope MS Doesn't Buy BB "
The Canadian government is likely to block BB's sale to a foreign company, for national security reasons. They signalled this when rumours of a Lenovo takeover surfaced late last year.
True, Lenovo is Chinese and Microsoft is American, but they know that as soon as ownership leaves our borders, it's outside their control forever. There'd be nothing to stop a future sale to a company HQ'd in a less desirable country.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kbahey on Friday May 29 2015, @04:28PM
By the same author (McNish), an article: How BlackBerry Blew It! The Inside Story [theglobeandmail.com], from 2013, in a Canadian newspaper that probes how and why BlackBerry failed.
Lazaridis, the co-founder of BlackBerry was obsessed with battery life and a physical keyboard. He thought the iPhone was too complex when he bought and disassembled one. In its late days, BlackBerry was about to release their popular messenger, BBM, on other platforms, but the board and Lazaridis overruled that at the last minute, prompting Balsilie to resign and sell all his stock.
An interesting read ...
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