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by mikeash 4652 days ago
I'd put it under both "lack of technology innovation" and "lost touch with the consumer".

Around 2007 with the release of the iPhone, the smartphone market shifted massively. Within a relatively short time, people wanted phones with (relatively speaking, for the time) gigantic screens, no hardware keyboards, fluid touch-based UIs, and abundant third-party apps. Apple delivered on this, and Google followed fairly closely behind.

BB was caught flat-footed and took years to catch up on the UI and form factor, by which time they were too late to catch up on the apps, which is probably what ultimately killed them. BB's success was in a time where the phone maker and the carrier were expected to provide nearly all of the useful functionality on a phone, whereas with iPhone and Android, while they're still expected to be useful out of the box, it's also expected that the user will heavily customize them with third-party apps.
3 comments
bunderbunder 4652 days ago
Those problems might not have been insurmountable. But the app situation was at the very least an illustration of why they were doomed from the get-go. When you require someone to send in a notarized photocopy of your government ID card before you'll let them develop software for your platform, well. . . I don't even know what to say. That policy spoke for itself.
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sivetic 4652 days ago
You can add badly run company to the list as well. They refused to acknowledge any problems until relatively recently. Even after a senior exec went public with an email describing the problems (link: http://bgr.com/2011/06/30/open-letter-to-blackberry-bosses-s...), they still continued to deny and paint a rosy picture (which steadily got worse) to the investors and internal staff.
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Someone 4652 days ago
I am not sure they ever were in touch with the consumer. Their business was built on the enterprise, but they somewhat accidentally got a lot of consumer customers (teenagers lured by the cheap (or was that even free?) messaging)

I don't think they ever truly realized what that should mean for their product range.

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