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.... just finished book, revealing. Cancelled my search for a Carrier for my Classic. No more interest in a Keyone. I've learned my lesson.
CARRIERS RULE!! ... regardless of their C R A P device offerings.
.. next best is Kyocera PRO2. .. need another one, SO won't let me use hers.
Old Gramps
What does the KEYᵒⁿᵉ have to with Mike and Jim?
In any event, you should be looking at something from 2019/2020 anyway.
Check out iOS with any carrier offered device.
Carriers for the most part aren't the enemy - carriers don't really care what phones they sell, as long as:
- Customers come into the store in high volumes looking to buy it, and sign up for service in the process.
- The phone is fast to set up and easy for new users to use.
- There are very few returns for any reason, as those cost the carriers a ton of money.
- The company supplying the phone is able to market the brand and drive interest in it.
Those things really haven't been true of BB-branded phones since 2011. The Storm is arguably the device that morally wounded the company, because Mike couldn't accept a standard touchscreen and insisted on developing the clicky screen (Sure Touch) that literally no one asked for, and which worked poorly and caused all kinds of problems long-term.
Anyway, Verizon alone lost a billion dollars on the Storm, and as Jim said in the book, "We're not prepared to write that kind of check." As true as that was, leaving your most important partner with a billion dollar loss isn't exactly the best recipe for long-term business success - and it's not like they had an amazing product that was going to set sales records and make Big Red a ton of money coming up - they only continued to cause losses for their carrier partners.
ANY retailer is going to reconsider a product line or a brand if that brand fails with customers and causes a lot of returns and high rates of dissatisfaction, whether you're a grocery store, a car company, or a restaurant. It was BB's job to meet the needs and desires of the customers and the carriers - but Mike was only interested in doing what HE wanted, and cared little about what the customers wanted. As soon as any real competition showed up, Mike was quickly outclassed and had no real answer. Being isolated from the center of the tech world, and surrounded by "yes men" who couldn't tell Mike "no", Mike was allowed to drive the BB train off a cliff.
Google saw the iPhone and the company went into almost a panic... changed directions with their new upcoming mobile OS and even that first devices form factor. And they quickly saw how important developers would be... and started a number of developer events and pretended Android would be more open source to attract more developers to the platform.
Mike and Jim saw the iPhone and laughed.... and tired to find ways to spend their millions. Like getting another NHL team for Canada.
In 2007, Google at least had all of the pieces to be able to react within a year.
In 2007, BlackBerry was 3-4 years away from being able to deliver anything new - even if they had jumped right on it.
By 2010 it was all over anyway. BlackBerry didn't have a chance.
2007 I first came to CrackBerry for help, lots of smart folks here back then... and lot's of discussion about BlackBerry needing a new OS to keep up with iOS, upcoming Android and even the new Palm OS that was in development. Me, I just assumed that back at the BlackBerry skunkworks, they were already working on "what's next" like Palm was... but they were just being more quite about it.
2010 and "oh, we are going to start building a new OS"... was very surprising to me.
I've often wondered if BlackBerry had bought Palm... if that might have changed anything. Probably not in the long run. But two varmints of WebOS... Palm for consumers and BlackBerry secured for enterprise. Kept Palms and BBOS devices in production and brought a secure WebOS BlackBerry to market in 2011. Kept WebOS developer interested, gave BBOS developer a platform they could possible start making money on pretty quickly. And brought two fanbases together to oppose these new comers...
I just think too many people are quick to blame Mike and Jim. As far as I'm concerned when the iPhone came out in 2007 it was a total paradigm shift, and BlackBerry, sitting on an unscalable platform, had no chance to counter it even if they had jumped right on it.
5 years earlier, BlackBerry itself was a paradigm shift, and they reaped the rewards for many years. I think it's too much to expect someone to strike gold twice.
Plus were incentivized to keep status quo without ever having a plan b
iOS and Android and to a degree Windows... didn't sneak up on anyone. Palm had taken the hints and "shifted", not that it did them much good.
Does show how outclassed both Palm and BlackBerry were.... let's face it, BlackBerry starting on a new OS in 2016 would have burned a lot of their cash. They would have been just like Palm, and been broke trying to launch a new OS and new phones.
I do wonder if in 2009 they could have gotten away with a BIS enabled new OS.... that would have really been their only hope.
Google's big advantage was that they (like Microsoft and for a while Yahoo, and for sure Apple) had built out a bunch of cloud services, and there's a huge synergy between cloud services and modern smartphones. BB really should have done the same, with email at the very least (they did do messaging - they just designed it poorly because it was tied to a device), and they could have continued adding cloud-based services. That would have also generated extra revenue (imagine a subscription service for a "secure" email that didn't have your data sold to anyone) and more importantly, investors would have looked at BB in a VERY different way.
Unfortunately, Mike got too caught up in devices, and couldn't see the forest for the trees. Devices are always a brutal business - services are where the real money is, especially subscription-based services. You'd better believe that tons of people who were using BB secure email back in 2005 would STILL be paying a monthly fee to keep that email box around, even if they hadn't carried a BB device in a decade.
Yeah I never understood why BlackBerry didn't do more... the did buy a few Cloud companies.
But they neutered the backup features that BBOS had when they pushed out BB10.... why?
Cloud BES with Email, Storage, Doc-to-Go, BBMe... and later apps like HUB+. No they'd never be competitive with Google and MS, but they might have craved out something that didn't require hardware.
I remember having my Bold stolen in an airport on the first leg of a ten-day business trip. I logged in on my laptop, security-wiped my phone, then stopped in an AT&T store, got a replacement, set it up with my BBID, and in less than 60 minutes from the time of the theft with non Korea effort on my part, I had my phone back Ike nothing had ever happened.
Z10 = BB10 + VKB > iOS + Android