[mozartpc27]

From what I can see, barring an unforeseen innovation by the company, BlackBerry is now in an irreversible death spiral, and the problem is two-fold.

The first problem is one that is BlackBerry's specifically. If you look back historically, once the public has decided that a tech company's products are no longer what it wants, that something has eclipsed the offerings of a particular company, this decision is almost never reversed. History is littered with once-giant computer and other "digital product" companies that bit the dust or a shell of what they used to be (at least in terms of offering hardware or an operating platform): Commodore/Amiga, Atari, Coleco, Tandy (RadioShack), Sega, Palm, and even once-giants of the PC-Clone industry like Gateway and Dell. None of these companies have been or were able to return to their former glory days, because once the mass exodus has begun, it is next to impossible to reverse.

Unless, of course, you do reverse it. There are the major exceptions: Nintendo was looking pretty finished until the Wii (and now is looking pretty finished again), and Apple was next to dead before the iPod. What do these two turnaround stories have in common? In each case, the company in question had something genuinely NEW to bring to market. People didn't go back to Apple because of their computers; they'd tried those, they'd rejected them. People went back to Apple because of the iPod. Once the iPod was in enough hands, Apple was able to make a revival in personal computer sales follow. Same with Nintendo: people didn't go back to Nintendo for a new version of Mario - they went because of the novelty of the "gesture control."

BlackBerry can't expect to bring people back with a smartphone. People bought their smartphones - in huge numbers - used their smartphones, and have now judged their smartphones to be lacking. Unless BlackBerry can come up with a NON-SMARTPHONE reason to bring people back, I am afraid it's curtains.

This brings me to the second of BlackBerry's problems, and it's not just a BlackBerry problem, it's a tech-industry problem. The lst 13 years of the digital revolution have followed one basic trend: the uncluttering of people's lives. Turns out all those spare, all-white 70s movies set in the future were right about one thing: there I going to be a lot less "stuff" in the future. In the last 13 years, we've seen the beginning of the inexorable process of replacement for everything in our lives that could conceivably be replaced with a digital equivalent: music, photographs, home videos, movies, books, paperwork of all kinds, magazines, telephone directories and personal contact books, personal calendars, etc., etc., etc. In the case of some things, people want the "stuff," but don't necessarily want to sacrifice the space needed to store the "stuff" - they want the music, but not the CD; the movie, but not the DVD; the text, but not the book.

The problem is - and I believe this is why Apple's stock is falling as it has been, and why the tech industry in general is about to hit a wall - pretty much everything that you can think of that is like that has been done already. Music is digitized. Movies are digitized. Books. Photographs. Personal files and paperwork.

There is nothing left to digitize, only an increasingly nasty fight over how divvy up the pie. Apple, after a long run of introducing products that had a definite newness to them - the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the MacBook Air with its incredibly light weight chassis - is now left only with the ability to re-size what they already offer. Hence the iPad Mini and the ever-increasing iPhone screen size. But how many people who own an iPad really need a 7-inch iPad?

This is not a criticism of Apple (though I am not a fan), it's just the way it is; every company that now deals with computers (in the loosest sense) is about to the end of where these things can go. After touch screen, what? After solid-state ultra-fast, ultra-lightweight laptops, what? After 3D flat screen plasma TVs, what? How much faster can this stuff get? How much sharper? I am sure there is room for growth, but at a certain point human perception isn't fine enough to tell the difference.

How many different ways can you sell the same product - laptop, tablet, phone? If BlackBerry WANTED TO or COULD innovate, where would it go? There is no great digitization left to be done (there isn't that thing left that's in everyone's house, taking up a ton of space, and begging to be replaced by a digital version). Another smartphone, however fast it is on the internet or however many apps are made available for it, is still just another smartphone.

Where can BlackBerry go? Hell, where can ANY of them go?

That's the problem I see for the industry. And that's bad enough for Apple, the industry leader; where does that leave an industry also-ran like BlackBerry?

The idea of "mobile computing" seems like it gets at an answer to these questions, but it seems there is no clear vision for what that is. Is it, as I imagine it to be, the dawning of an era where our cell phones are our only computers as such, and the rest of what we have are essentially terminals on a personal mainframe - a tablet-sized screen that can display information from the smartphone, but that is itself really just a screen with a wireless connection to the phone? A "laptop" that is just a larger screen combined with a keyboard, that again links wirelessly to the phone for all other functions? That MIGHT be cool - indeed, it could be like a digitizing of the digital, an uncluttering that reduces all of our various devices - tablet, laptop, phone, mp3 player - to a single device with different form-factor terminals - but that is just combining and packaging already-existing products, and doesn't really de-clutter much except insofar as it reduces the necessary hard drives and processors to one.

And if that isn't what "mobile computing" is, then what the hell is it? And does it do anything to give BlackBerry that NEW thing that might bring people back?

[anon5771888]

From what I can see, barring an unforeseen innovation by the company, BlackBerry is now in an irreversible death spiral, and the problem is two-fold.

The first problem is one that is BlackBerry's specifically. If you look back historically, once the public has decided that a tech company's products are no longer what it wants, that something has eclipsed the offerings of a particular company, this decision is almost never reversed. History is littered with once-giant computer and other "digital product" companies that bit the dust or a shell of what they used to be (at least in terms of offering hardware or an operating platform): Commodore/Amiga, Atari, Coleco, Tandy (RadioShack), Sega, Palm, and even once-giants of the PC-Clone industry like Gateway and Dell. None of these companies have been or were able to return to their former glory days, because once the mass exodus has begun, it is next to impossible to reverse.

Unless, of course, you do reverse it. There are the major exceptions: Nintendo was looking pretty finished until the Wii (and now is looking pretty finished again), and Apple was next to dead before the iPod. What do these two turnaround stories have in common? In each case, the company in question had something genuinely NEW to bring to market. People didn't go back to Apple because of their computers; they'd tried those, they'd rejected them. People went back to Apple because of the iPod. Once the iPod was in enough hands, Apple was able to make a revival in personal computer sales follow. Same with Nintendo: people didn't go back to Nintendo for a new version of Mario - they went because of the novelty of the "gesture control."

BlackBerry can't expect to bring people back with a smartphone. People bought their smartphones - in huge numbers - used their smartphones, and have now judged their smartphones to be lacking. Unless BlackBerry can come up with a NON-SMARTPHONE reason to bring people back, I am afraid it's curtains.

This brings me to the second of BlackBerry's problems, and it's not just a BlackBerry problem, it's a tech-industry problem. The lst 13 years of the digital revolution have followed one basic trend: the uncluttering of people's lives. Turns out all those spare, all-white 70s movies set in the future were right about one thing: there I going to be a lot less "stuff" in the future. In the last 13 years, we've seen the beginning of the inexorable process of replacement for everything in our lives that could conceivably be replaced with a digital equivalent: music, photographs, home videos, movies, books, paperwork of all kinds, magazines, telephone directories and personal contact books, personal calendars, etc., etc., etc. In the case of some things, people want the "stuff," but don't necessarily want to sacrifice the space needed to store the "stuff" - they want the music, but not the CD; the movie, but not the DVD; the text, but not the book.

The problem is - and I believe this is why Apple's stock is falling as it has been, and why the tech industry in general is about to hit a wall - pretty much everything that you can think of that is like that has been done already. Music is digitized. Movies are digitized. Books. Photographs. Personal files and paperwork.

There is nothing left to digitize, only an increasingly nasty fight over how divvy up the pie. Apple, after a long run of introducing products that had a definite newness to them - the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the MacBook Air with its incredibly light weight chassis - is now left only with the ability to re-size what they already offer. Hence the iPad Mini and the ever-increasing iPhone screen size. But how many people who own an iPad really need a 7-inch iPad?

This is not a criticism of Apple (though I am not a fan), it's just the way it is; every company that now deals with computers (in the loosest sense) is about to the end of where these things can go. After touch screen, what? After solid-state ultra-fast, ultra-lightweight laptops, what? After 3D flat screen plasma TVs, what? How much faster can this stuff get? How much sharper? I am sure there is room for growth, but at a certain point human perception isn't fine enough to tell the difference.

How many different ways can you sell the same product - laptop, tablet, phone? If BlackBerry WANTED TO or COULD innovate, where would it go? There is no great digitization left to be done (there isn't that thing left that's in everyone's house, taking up a ton of space, and begging to be replaced by a digital version). Another smartphone, however fast it is on the internet or however many apps are made available for it, is still just another smartphone.

Where can BlackBerry go? Hell, where can ANY of them go?

That's the problem I see for the industry. And that's bad enough for Apple, the industry leader; where does that leave an industry also-ran like BlackBerry?

The idea of "mobile computing" seems like it gets at an answer to these questions, but it seems there is no clear vision for what that is. Is it, as I imagine it to be, the dawning of an era where our cell phones are our only computers as such, and the rest of what we have are essentially terminals on a personal mainframe - a tablet-sized screen that can display information from the smartphone, but that is itself really just a screen with a wireless connection to the phone? A "laptop" that is just a larger screen combined with a keyboard, that again links wirelessly to the phone for all other functions? That MIGHT be cool - indeed, it could be like a digitizing of the digital, an uncluttering that reduces all of our various devices - tablet, laptop, phone, mp3 player - to a single device with different form-factor terminals - but that is just combining and packaging already-existing products, and doesn't really de-clutter much except insofar as it reduces the necessary hard drives and processors to one.

And if that isn't what "mobile computing" is, then what the hell is it? And does it do anything to give BlackBerry that NEW thing that might bring people back?

Spot on my friend, the next couple of years is going to be real interesting.