[westcoastjay]

There has been a ton of comments to every new post on the forums about how BB has done a horrible job of marketing BB10. While I see a lot of room for improvement I think that the main issues are that the carriers in the US don't want to sell Blackberry.

Since the launch of BB10 I have seen more advertising, brand placement (ie: Formula 1, Toronto Blue Jays etc) than ever before but I also live in Canada. When I go to carriers in Canada they have a dedicated area for BB10 and it looks good.

However when I cross the border and visit any of the US carriers including Verizon and AT&T I see nothing. At a recent AT&T store I saw the Q10 placed between an HTC One and a Samsung Note 2. They didn't even have a Z10 on display. It boggles my mind that a company would allow carriers to do this. Apple sure wouldn't.

My conclusion is that BB needs to grow some Balls and be confident in their product and don't settle to be another phone on a shelf. If the carrier isn't willing to allocate some space then tell them to eat it and move on. They aren't gaining any market share they way it is.

[pkcable]

I agree with some of what you are saying. BUT we still see BB10 commercials here, PLUS their was good in store presence when the devices first launched, but perhaps based on sales, that has changed.

[gitchies]

What are you talking about they do a fabulous job in marketing.....the best...no? Just like this one?

[GadgetTravel]

I just don't think this is primarily a marketing problem. Nor a carrier problem. I think that is just not facing the real problem which is the combination of devices, apps and overall "ecosystem". Basically why would someone chose a BlackBerry. I did for the keyboard. After a month or more with my Q10 I'm happy with the keyboard but if it weren't for that and the fact that I also have an iPhone 5 I simply would not even consider a BlackBerry. For me the apps and other considerations are far too limiting. And I don't mean Instagram and such although I understand I am in the minority there. I've never used instagram. I mean productivity apps.

I think BlackBerry needs to face the issue and start throwing cash at developers to port apps as well as trying to pick a niche, maybe two, such as email and become clearly and demonstrably the best at that niche in some way. I don't think they have that now.

Posted via CB10

[gitchies]

Or maybe this one was the one I was meaning.....

[ranzabar]

It's all about selling to the masses. And the mostly under age 40 masses. You can't be cool with a Blackberry or a Windows Phone. The cool factor wins no matter how much better the 'uncool' item is. Human nature.

IMHO, Blackberry should be doing the in-house dev on Made for Blackberry apps for all the mainstream stuff. Stop waiting for someone to finally write a native app or worse, a crap HTML5 one. BB has to take the bull by the nuts and get the cool factor back by filling in the blanks on the app scene.

If you don't. It's not gonna be pretty in the long haul

[JasW]

I think that the main issues are that the carriers in the US don't want to sell Blackberry.

Actually, the main issue is that people in the U.S. don't want to buy a BlackBerry. If they did, you can be sure that the carriers in the U.S. would want to sell it to them.

[Troy Tiscareno]

IMHO, Blackberry should be doing the in-house dev on Made for Blackberry apps for all the mainstream stuff. Stop waiting for someone to finally write a native app or worse, a crap HTML5 one.

If that was possible, they'd have done it. The truth is that most of those "big" apps don't have open APIs, so no third-party apps can connect to the service. And that's done on purpose; not to harm BB specifically, but to prevent third-parties from developing apps (or hacks) to their service on ANY platform.

At this point, it's all about marketshare. Until WP or BB10 gets well above 5% (and probably 10% for many companies), they simply won't have any interest in supporting those platforms beyond their mobile websites.

You can't just write an app front-end for a web service once, release it, and forget about it. If it was that easy, these companies would probably go ahead and write an app. It's far more complicated than that.

The cloud service is constantly evolving, and so are the UIs to access it. That means constant on-going development (which includes developers, managers, documentation, training, testing, marketing, and support costs) for multiple apps. Each time you add a platform, that's a whole group of people who have to be hired, trained, managed, and supported, and it increases the time from a change being desired to a product being released, which could allow a faster, more nimble company to steal your thunder. All of these are ongoing costs and risks, and the more platforms that are added, the more potential points of failure there are for a company, and the greater the ongoing cost of doing business.

These companies all do their own, independent evaluations of new platforms and their marketshare, and if that share isn't big enough to make all those ongoing costs and risks worth taking, then that platform isn't going to be supported. This is going to be an issue for all of the newer platforms:

• Windows Phone
• BlackBerry
• Tizen
• Firefox
• Ubuntu Edge

Sure, they can all run HTML5 web apps, but the reality is that customers prefer dedicated, native, UI-specific apps rather than web apps, and without marketshare, it's going to be nearly impossible to get those from a lot of the "major" companies.