[igets]

I was thrilled to see a Key2 laying out in a shop for the first time to test it yesterday only to notice that its charger wasn't working and the phone had no battery power left.

This wasn't the first time Saturn or Mediamarkt had unusable Blackberries laying out. Since I saw the keyone for the first time I have been in Shops in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Cologne and other cities and often saw that the phone was locked and required a PIN, had no access to the shops wifi, couldn't be turned on or other reasons why it could not be used. This is really annoying and I never noticed problems like that with Samsungs or other phones.

Did anyone else encounter problems like this?

[Dunt Dunt Dunt]

I'm in the US.... don't see those problems here.

Just be thankful there are display units to go see.

[igets]

Just be thankful there are display units to go see.

I am really thankful for those stores, don't get me wrong. That's why I love to go there.

But since I am impatiently waiting to get my hands on a key2 I was just too disappointed to see it not working there. I began to think if there is some kind of evil conspiracy against Blackberry going on (or the lord is telling me to save my money )

[Dunt Dunt Dunt]

I am really thankful for those stores, don't get me wrong. That's why I love to go there.

But since I am impatiently waiting to get my hands on a key2 I was just too disappointed to see it not working there. I began to think if there is some kind of evil conspiracy against Blackberry going on (or the lord is telling me to save my money )

I've seen the same for many other devices... usually in big box retail stores that have part time minimum wage employees. But it's not uncommon for them to lock computers and phones... so that customers have to talk to a sales associate. But I've see items that aren't powered or are even broken... still on display too.

[bh7171]

Here in the states, prior to KeyOne, which I have never seen here in California in the flesh, carriers buried BlackBerry devices just like all other brands not Apple or Samsung. Carriers and even Best Buy (and I am certain other retailers) lease out the prime floor space to the highest bidders. Apple and Samsung obviously pony up so they are front and center, in retail mode, and with dedicated personel to answer questions. At my local T-Mobile Apple even contracts out the cleaning and care of the kiosk display and devices. It is all very well thought out marketing on behalf of both the carriers and OEM's.

[Dunt Dunt Dunt]

Here in the states, prior to KeyOne, which I have never seen here in California in the flesh, carriers buried BlackBerry devices just like all other brands not Apple or Samsung. Carriers and even Best Buy (and I am certain other retailers) lease out the prime floor space to the highest bidders. Apple and Samsung obviously pony up so they are front and center, in retail mode, and with dedicated personel to answer questions. At my local T-Mobile Apple even contracts out the cleaning and care of the kiosk display and devices. It is all very well thought out marketing on behalf of both the carriers and OEM's.

In Best Buys, Samsung has a mini Store (just a counter really) in many locations.

BlackBerry did at one time have carrier reps like most OEMs... Verizon even had one come to our offer one time. But those sales people were let go back long ago, strangely some even before BB10 was launched, the rest that summer.

A manufacture needs volume of sale or a huge investment in money to pay for these "services". BBMo sales aren't sufficient to hire more than maybe a handful of reps in a few key markets, and they have no free cash sitting around to hire more in the hopes it would improve sales.

Maybe an incentive program... get volunteers involved to go in and check the displays. Pay them with perks like BlackBerry gear, t-shirts or build points towards a device.

[Troy Tiscareno]

In 2013, BB canceled their contract with the company that had provided 1100 store reps in North America. One of their responsibilities was to keep displays clean and functional. They also trained store employees on BB phones and other features - explaining features like BBM and Blend.

That's what store staff expects from the brands they care about - which is one big reason that so many are indifferent or even hostile towards the BB brand today - they feel like there is no support for them from BB, so they do their best to ignore BB and hope no one asks about them. You'd feel the same way if you worked in a car stereo shop and JVC never sent a rep while all the other major brands did, for example.

But think about what it cost for BB to hire 1100 contractors with company vehicles, and keep them trained and equipped, etc. And that's just North America (probably just the US and Canada in fact). You can't even begin to think about that when you are selling under a million devices a year worldwide...

[bh7171]

It's a Catch 22 scenario.

[Lachs Schnittchen]

In Austria they just laugh when I ask whether there are any BBs in store. It's sad.

[igets]

Thank you all for the insights. I was really unaware of those things. This helps me to be a little less impatient with the situation

[gebco]

Deleted post

[idssteve]

I recall sensing open hostility to BB at Verizon stores back in 2010. While seeking a then new 9650. Driving across multiple states, I was struck by the verbatim responses... "oh, blackberry is obsolete and going out of business...". Lol. Followed by: "droid is the future! ... have you looked at this droid...". Lol. At least four stores in three states, almost identically worded responses... lol. I complained to Verizon, and alerted RIM, including sales reps servicing my company... never detected any change... similar story EVERY time I've asked a vzw floor rep about BlackBerry since. Any extended conversation eventually uncovered very bad feelings over the Storm fiasco.

I knew they'd laid off sales reps. Never suspected they eliminated nearly all 1100 of them. Tough to break thru the "carrier barrier" without even a handshake somewhere. Lol.

[Troy Tiscareno]

Any extended conversation eventually uncovered very bad feelings over the Storm fiasco.

The Storm fiasco cost Verizon over a billion dollars, and caused reps to lose a lot of commissions and have to deal with a lot of angry customers. If you were a rep during that period, the animosity would be pretty understandable. The Storm was the beginning of the end for BB's smartphone business, even before BB10.

I knew they'd laid off sales reps. Never suspected they eliminated nearly all 1100 of them. Tough to break thru the "carrier barrier" without even a handshake somewhere. Lol.

It wasn't "nearly all of them", it was ALL of them, as all store reps had been contract employees. LOL. A few of those guys posted their "goodbyes" here and related their experiences working for BB back then - you could probably find the thread if you wanted to dig around enough.

[igets]

The Storm fiasco cost Verizon over a billion Dollars (...) .

Just out of curiousity: what was the storm fiasco?

[igets]

In Austria they just laugh when I ask whether there are any BBs in store. It's sad.

Oh that's really bad. If it wasn't for these stores I never would have known that blackberry is still on the market.

I guess I really stop complaining now and just be thankfull when I get the Chance to test a key2

[donnation]

I recall sensing open hostility to BB at Verizon stores back in 2010. While seeking a then new 9650. Driving across multiple states, I was struck by the verbatim responses... "oh, blackberry is obsolete and going out of business...". Lol. Followed by: "droid is the future! ... have you looked at this droid...".

So these guys knew the future back in 2010. Pretty amazing.

[idssteve]

So these guys knew the future back in 2010. Pretty amazing.

Little did any of us suspect at the time. Lol. Sometimes "future" can be self fulfilling. Looking back, it's too easy to see where that came from and where it was going. At the time it just seemed "unprofessional", to me. AND, at the time, seemed to say more about Verizon than RIM.

Of course I was completely ignorant of how RIM had treated their biggest customer, vzw. In retrospect, the whole thing has been pretty shameful. VZW's rural coverage was/is too useful to abandon, for me.

[idssteve]

Just out of curiousity: what was the storm fiasco?

The Storm was basically RIM's first slab. ATT enjoyed iPhone exclusive, at the time. Verizon was desperate for an "iPhone type" to compete with ATT. RIM threw Storm together & on VZW shelves before it was "half baked". Some of us questioned if the batter had been stirred, let alone baked. Lol.

RIM managed to sort some things out and I've always heard Storm2 was much better.

Apparently RIM found a loophole in their agreements with VZW and managed to stick VZW with about $1B on device returns. Which, as Troy alludes, also impacted floor sales personnel, etc. Obviously leaving a nasty experience all around. Lol.

Agreements, or not, it's really no way to treat your biggest customer... IF you plan to stay in business, imo. Given the sales force layoffs, it seems questionable whether RIM/BBRY was planning to stay in business at that point. Hard for most businesses to survive without sales reps, marketing, production, R&D, ... lol.

[Troy Tiscareno]

Agreements, or not, it's really no way to treat your biggest customer... IF you plan to stay in business, imo. Given the sales force layoffs, it seems questionable whether RIM/BBRY was planning to stay in business at that point. Hard for most businesses to survive without sales reps, marketing, production, R&D, ... lol.

It's clear that BB was doing everything they could to stay in business - just not the *smartphone* business. It's pretty clear that by the summer of 2013, it was crystal clear that the BB10 project was a complete failure *financially* (this is not a judgement on the OS itself as far as technical use goes), and because BB had gone "all in" and bet the house on BB10's success, its failure meant drastic change for the company. I strongly believe that the BB BoD knew at that point that smartphones were not in its future, which is why they sought out Watsa and brought in an enterprise software turn-around expert (Chen) rather than a hardware/consumer retail expert.

Of course, BB had purchase agreements in place for components and manufacturing, so it made some sense to cancel anything they could cancel as far as component contracts go, but also to build and sell devices to burn through the hardware commitments that they couldn't get out of. That's why the 2nd generation of BB10 devices existed - BB needed to monetize those components as inexpensively as possible. But keeping around 1100 North American field reps (plus who knows how many in Europe and elsewhere) was both unsustainable and pointless given BB's planned exit of the market.

I also think (as do others - it's certainly not my idea alone) that Chen greenlit the Priv mostly as an excuse to develop BB Android so that he would have SOMETHING he could license out and hopefully recover some portion of the massive losses that BB10 incurred. Obviously that's worked out pretty well for BB - not amazingly because of sales volumes, but I am sure it's profitable, and that's really what matters to the Board.

[Dunt Dunt Dunt]

Just out of curiousity: what was the storm fiasco?

STORM was the biggest thing BlackBerry ever did... and it was worst thing they ever did.


Clickable Touch Screen - insanity or genius?

STORM is pretty much what put CrackBerry on the map, as owning a STORM required a lot of outside support. To this day the Storm section of CrackBerry has had more views than any other device - spent a lot of time there mighself. It was the iPhone Killer (marketing that was used back then) that had too little memory to actually run the OS efficiently - and the OS was half baked. Folks were trying to "shrink" the OS and doing custom OS Build. It was a community device that brought many together in order to get the most out of it. But for the average consumer it was junk.

Even as buggy as Android was in those early days... it was much better received than the Storm. And Verizon became a huge supporter of Android after BlackBerry burned them with the Storm. Verizon still supported BlackBerry after that, but Android became their attempt at answering the iPhone challenge.

Why the BlackBerry Storm was the single biggest disaster in smartphone history


BlackBerry Storm Called One of the Biggest Failures in Smartphone History

[idssteve]

Unfortunately, they SOooo failed to learn Storm's lesson about half baked releases. Going joke among coworkers in my office, about mid2013, was if BB10 really meant "Barely Baked 1.0"... ?? A pint of "cookie dough" ice cream showed up in the break room fridge. Lol. Like Storm before it, Z/Q as released really weren't ready for prime time, either. Two half baked fiascos, in such short order, proved too disastrous. Reputation is a fragile thing. Lol.

Few would have blamed RIM BOD for rolling heads over Storm fiasco. Imo. Despite "record revenues" at the time. If they'd canned Mike over the Storm, QNX/BB10 fiasco might never have happened... Hard to argue they'd be in worse condition today... Imo.

[Dunt Dunt Dunt]

Unfortunately, they SOooo failed to learn Storm's lesson about half baked releases. Going joke among coworkers in my office, about mid2013, was if BB10 really meant "Barely Baked 1.0"... ?? A pint of "cookie dough" ice cream showed up in the break room fridge. Lol. Like Storm before it, Z/Q as released really weren't ready for prime time, either. Two half baked fiascos, in such short order, proved too disastrous. Reputation is a fragile thing. Lol.

Few would have blamed RIM BOD for rolling heads over Storm fiasco. Imo. Despite "record revenues" at the time. If they'd canned Mike over the Storm, QNX/BB10 fiasco might never have happened... Hard to argue they'd be in worse condition today... Imo.

PlayBook too... a tablet without email, and a BlackBerry tablet at that? I get the idea was for it to be more an accessory for the phone, but come on....

It was suppose to be the new platforms prototype device... and they learned nothing from it about the importance of building an ecosystem.... with the apps that users want. Or about not releasing a product when it's not ready.

That said... that they didn't have a "new" OS under development long before BB10... that's what killed the BlackBerry we knew. Starting in 2010 was already too late. And there were some here on CrackBerry back in the early days that said as much....

[idssteve]

PlayBook too... a tablet without email, and a BlackBerry tablet at that? I get the idea was for it to be more an accessory for the phone, but come on....

It was suppose to be the new platforms prototype device... and they learned nothing from it about the importance of building an ecosystem.... with the apps that users want. Or about not releasing a product when it's not ready.

That said... that they didn't have a "new" OS under development long before BB10... that's what killed the BlackBerry we knew. Starting in 2010 was already too late. And there were some here on CrackBerry back in the early days that said as much....

I still occasionally use my PlayBook, bridged to 9900, as an hdmi interface for presentations. 9900 trackpad, on "old" OS, affords superb pointing precision over our 100" conference room display. Classic's trackpad over Miracast is also quite good but never matched BBOS trackpad fluidity. Imo.

BBOS memory management and other handicaps certainly needed improvement and/or replacement. Its "hands on experience" derived UI did NOT need replacement. Its UI desperately needed preserving. For PKB handsets, at least. imo. What ever platform it's built on.

Always understood that Storm's touch UI pushed BBOS beyond its limits. Replacing BBOS with an improved OS needed to happen before Storm. Way before 2010. Replacing BBOS with an entirely new PLATFORM was a BIG bite for tiny RIM. Even if they could have brought their experience asset to bear. Tasking devs who've never done a smartphone before to assembling an entirely new platform virtually from scratch, was pretty aggressive for a tech monster like Apple. Expecting tiny RIM/QNX to pull it off, withOUT leveraging RIM's experience asset, was suicidal. Predictably so, imo. With predictable results. Here we are.

Also, can't blame QNX for RIM's poor planning but still entertaining to recall Amiga... ?? lol.

Looking back over this last decade, it's pretty hard to escape the feeling that BB has utterly destroyed itself in pursuit of glass. A pursuit they simply weren't adequately equipped for. Imo. RIM was doomed to niche status the instant tech monsters like Apple & Google stepped into the market. My personal contention has long been that they'd have been better served to embrace their inevitable niche status, defend those markets, and bide time till the monsters stop stomping and the dust settles a little. Instead, RIM lost their nerve, abandoned everything they knew, and utterly destroyed themselves pursuing every market except the ones they already dominated. The ones Apple nor Google really never challenged RIM for. The ones RIM preemptively surrendered, without challenge, imo. Here we are. Lol.

[Dunt Dunt Dunt]

I still occasionally use my PlayBook, bridged to 9900, as an hdmi interface for presentations. 9900 trackpad, on "old" OS, affords superb pointing precision over our 100" conference room display. Classic's trackpad over Miracast is also quite good but never matched BBOS trackpad fluidity. Imo.

BBOS memory management and other handicaps certainly needed improvement and/or replacement. Its "hands on experience" derived UI did NOT need replacement. Its UI desperately needed preserving. For PKB handsets, at least. imo. What ever platform it's built on.

Always understood that Storm's touch UI pushed BBOS beyond its limits. Replacing BBOS with an improved OS needed to happen before Storm. Way before 2010. Replacing BBOS with an entirely new PLATFORM was a BIG bite for tiny RIM. Even if they could have brought their experience asset to bear. Tasking devs who've never done a smartphone before to assembling an entirely new platform virtually from scratch, was pretty aggressive for a tech monster like Apple. Expecting tiny RIM/QNX to pull it off, withOUT leveraging RIM's experience asset, was suicidal. Predictably so, imo. With predictable results. Here we are.

Also, can't blame QNX for RIM's poor planning but still entertaining to recall Amiga... ?? lol.

Looking back over this last decade, it's pretty hard to escape the feeling that BB has utterly destroyed itself in pursuit of glass. A pursuit they simply weren't adequately equipped for. Imo. RIM was doomed to niche status the instant tech monsters like Apple & Google stepped into the market. My personal contention has long been that they'd have been better served to embrace their inevitable niche status, defend those markets, and bide time till the monsters stop stomping and the dust settles a little. Instead, RIM lost their nerve, abandoned everything they knew, and utterly destroyed themselves pursuing every market except the ones they already dominated. The ones Apple nor Google really never challenged RIM for. The ones RIM preemptively surrendered, without challenge, imo. Here we are. Lol.

I do agree that the new platform should have been an evolution of the old, and not just starting all over. BlackBerry expect a lot of their users and developers... too much.

But also agree they were doomed by big money... and by their own success, as BlackBerry wasn't a good purchase for any of those players back in those days as it was too well valued by investors. Wasn't till 2012 that the "speculators" got out.... by then nobody needed what Blackberry had. Had BB been reasonably valued in 2006, someone might have stepped in...

[igets]

As someone you has almost completely missed out on Blackberry until this year your discussion was just fascinating to read. This makes a lot things easier to understand.
Thanks for taking the time to share your experiences and thoughts. Really appreciate it