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https://ca.news.yahoo.com/blackberry...--finance.html
Stock down 7.27-0.08 (-1.09%) At close: 4:00 PM EDT on DTEK60 launch day."This one is our phone," BlackBerry Chief Operating Officer Marty Beard said in an interview. "This is fully our responsibility."
Yeah, watch the video for what he said.
https://youtu.be/1g_PCVxPKuc
Once again, BB is talking about their entire phone strategy as being enterprise-centric (even twice mentioning the "enterprise of things"), and yet their partner(s?) is making a low-cost consumer phone. There is no indication that any company is interested in licensing BB phone software for enterprise-related use or marketing.
This overall lack of understanding of who BB's customers really are is, IMO, a big reason they continue to struggle.
They are done... they just can't really admit that they are done.
How do you launch a new phone based on BlackBerry secret sauce... if there won't be anymore secret sauce? HOPE is all BlackBerry has to sell millions of dollars worth of inventory. And hope is pretty easy to sell to those that are desperate to buy.
BB10 is still alive and kicking, might even license it to others. And we've got 10.3.3 just about, almost ready.... doesn't cost anything to say it, but how many went out an bought a 2nd (3rd or 4th) Passport in the hopes that it might happen?
BlackBerry Android, going to find partners to license it and sell these phones everywhere.... doesn't cost anything to say it, but sure helps move DTEK phones off the shelves.
But BB10 is dead, and there is very little reason for them to continue to invest in Android development at this point (apps maybe if they are turning a profit... OS no). Their partners could install stock Android and save money (and Chen almost said that), as so far these aren't markets where the security aspect means anything. Now if they had a partner for the US that was going after government users... sure the security would mean everything. But who thinks a 3rd party is going to try what BlackBerry couldn't do? Why would you imagine someone else would be more successful? Maybe if a BIG player stepped up...
Except the big players already have their own security solutions which have already been selling just fine for them - so why pay to license BB's "secret sauce" when no one is complaining about the existing flavor?
It depends on what is cheaper? If I can license BlackBerry's solution for less than I can develop a solution, then it makes sense to license. If not, screw it.
I look at this as an opportunity for a manufacturer who doesn't want to deal with the software, and wants to have someone else deal with the updates. Then awesome.
Posted via CB10
Except Blackberry themselves have said Troy have said and they think it is unrealistic a big player will license the BB name.
100,000 Playbooks were sold in that quarter while the "BB10 on Playbook" promise was current. Prior to the promise, sales had been flat, after Thor shrugged and said BB10 wasn't coming, Playbook sales pretty much ceased.
Attachment 410679
Posted via CB10
I think BlackBerry has lost more cash and sales under Android than under BB10. Is this true? They were already trending downward, massively so, but I thought the Passport and Classic launches were minor successes?
Android was a bad move.
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BB lost money on every single BB10 phone they made - not because of the parts that went into them or because of manufacturing costs (though those were higher than other companies, due to the lower volumes), but because of the MASSIVE costs of developing both BB10 and the entire ecosystem that went with it.
Android has relatively few costs, because Google pays for the majority of the development and all of the ecosystem. But, yes, BB still wasn't making money, because their sales had dropped too far, and because they didn't have the money to change their negative brand image in the market (having their CEO speculate that they were likely to exit the handset business certainly didn't help!).
But Android was not BB's biggest or primary problem; BB10 was, or, more correctly, Mike Lazaridis was - and he's the one who pushed for BB10 when it was far too late to try to start another ecosystem.
It's really not possible for them to have lost as much money on android as they did on BB10 (AKA 'The Value Killer') - only one phone with an inhouse design and two based on reference designs and an OS where the heavy lifting is done by third party (google) with much lower productions runs against an OS where every design was custom, the OS had to created and supported from scratch. The Z10 allow had a $1 billion write-down against it. As Troy says not a single BB10 phone was a commercial success and they threw money at it for years.
It's roughly an order of magnitude difference. How much did you think they spent on r and d for each program?
How much revenue do you think each program brought in?
Just to baseline, which do you think is bigger, a cow or an elephant?
Has the Passport outsold the Priv?
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Yes I would think so, but that doesn't change anything.
How's about answering my questions?
No pressure, not holding my breath.
Yes, but they also LOSE over $100 per PP sold because development costs are spread over so few phones. Thus, selling more phones actually hurts BB more, because they're still on the wrong side of the cost/volume sold curve.
They may be selling fewer Android phones, but if they're only losing $5-10 per phone sold (including development costs), then they're still doing significantly better with Android.
Mike assumed that BB would be able to sell 40-50M BB10 phones per year, which would have made BB10 profitable. In fact, they never broke 8M per year, and according to Chen, 10M per year is the minimum needed to break even with BB10. Sales of ALL phones, including BBOS, BB10, and Android are under 500k per quarter currently.
The real issue from what I have seen is the fact the OS10 was way to late getting to the market and Android and IOS was already established as the operating systems that any new one would be judged.
Microsoft with all their resources which included some top notch engineering and software folks and they couldn't make Windows mobile happen with all the money they poured into it.
I really think if they wanted to pursue the Android route, they should have done that instead of creating OS10, but that's just my opinion and is water under the bridge at this point in time.
Another OS casualty is going to be Tizen, even with the resources of the giant Samsung, it was doomed before it even got off the ground. Sound familiar!!!!
Mike never wanted Android - and while I understand his reasons for that (not having control of the OS [security and other issues], not having control of the platform [no way to generate money from the ecosystem], etc.), the fact is that when Mike finally accepted that BBOS wasn't the way forward, it was already late in 2009, and it was really too late to launch a competing platform, much less start to develop one from scratch. The "race" happened between early 2007 (the iPhone announcement) and 2009, when Android 2.x was launching and tons of manufacturers were signing on and devs started to adopt it as their second ecosystem. By 2010, devs were pretty committed, and both Apple and Google showed very strong commitments towards both the platform and their devs.
Timing was not something anyone had control over, but it's also not something that was any secret to anyone - the tech press was FULL of articles discussing the consolidation of iOS and Android - and the rapid fall of WinMobile, WebOS, Symbian, BBOS, Meego, and others, as well as how critical timing was. BB (meaning Mike) simply wasn't prepared for a competitor like Apple or Google, much less both, and he hadn't been working on a new, advanced "OS of the future", despite being well aware that BBOS was rapidly approaching its limits, and despite rumors of an Apple "superphone" starting way back in 2005. Mike simply refused to believe that anyone could beat him, or that his 2G-based system could be obsoleted. When the iPhone launched, it was so far ahead of what he thought possible that he literally had no answer for it - he was in disbelief. And he essentially ignored the real problem and tried to use what he had (BBOS) to compete against the iPhone, even knowing BBOS wasn't suited for the job. Predictably, it was a huge failure (the Storm).
It's not at all unusual that timing is super-critical in business - especially in the tech world where things move quickly and competition is fierce. IMO, RIM/BB was far too insulated from the fast pace and aggressive attitude that exists in Silicon Valley, and Mike had more of a researcher's attitude towards time: "we'll release it when we get it working" rather than "we've got to do whatever it takes to get it working before our (set) release date." He wasn't used to being rushed, hadn't built RIM's structure to deal with it, and thus wasn't prepared to compete against Class-A competition. Of course, neither was Microsoft, and they have even LESS of an excuse for their failure, which is largely due to Balmer, because Bill Gates was a huge champion of mobile since the late 90s - long before the hardware existed to meet his vision.
Anyway, by the end of 2009, starting a new platform wasn't a viable option, so Mike should have adopted Android back then, as I and many others said loudly at the time (plenty of articles in the tech press at the time urged Mike to do so, so I can't claim any special insight). That he tried to start a whole platform in 2010 was virtual insanity.
Okay so you are pretty darn good at giving historical overviews, but let's make it a bit more interesting. What is your opinion about the smartphone market for the next 5, 10 or whatever years? Using history, it is very hard for any new mobile platform to compete with the current platforms. So what is going to happen according to you?
I hate the duopoly that currently exists, much less the very real threat of a Google monopoly. If they play it smart, they can kill of all other Android smartphone companies by switching to ChromeOS AND killing Google Play Services (effectively rendering Android useless for most consumers).
But what is your take?
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Google doesn't want to be in the hardware business. They'd rather their partners dealt with that lower-margin part of business, but like MS with the Surface line, they do a small amount in order to push their partners to innovate and "show them what's possible." I don't expect that to change, really, though I think Google will increase their hardware participation in IoT - connected home stuff, mainly.
I don't see the Apple/Google duopoly changing, nor do I see Google abandoning Play Services or trying to take the smartphone business from their partners. Just as with the desktop, I believe we'll see Apple and Google be the long-term leaders in mobile because of the costs and difficulty of building the ecosystem.
For Google.... smartphones and even Android are pretty meaningless, other than as a way to feed their advertising engine. But Google does have a problem, and that is Apple and iOS. Google doesn't care about Apple's tiny market share... it that Apple's tiny market share is made up of the most valuable potential customers for Google advertising engine. Thus Google went directly after the iPhone with these new PIXEL phones....
And I think Google knows that going forward, Apple is in a position to compete or maybe even beat them in the next tech shakeup..... whatever that might end up being ....
Maybe an AI - or as close to one as they can do, that becomes "THE" UI of all your devices - Phone, TV, Car, Home, everything.... Or maybe BlackBerry and Nanthealth is working on an implant that would allow you to use BB10 to interface with the world without a UI at all. ;)
I do find it odd that the one phone that BlackBerry could have made that might not have been a flop was the Mercury. As a the world's only good PKB it might have carved out a niche ( say 3 million units a year).
I do like the BlackBerry's take on Android but the $150 cdn surcharge over the Alcatel version is just too much.
The trouble with Blackberry is that they can not be trusted to continue making OS updates. It could be that they stop after the current DTEK production run has sold out.
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Okay thanks for sharing your expectations. I guess the future will unfold itself. What makes me the most curious is whether seemingly untouchable ideas can suddenly change. Like how Nokia and BlackBerry took a "dive". It could happen to this terrible duopoy, even if it is far more difficult than years ago. It's what I am hoping for anyway :)
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The duopoly is more likely broken by a technology or application of technology we are unaware of - that was never going to be BB10 which was simply 'us too!'
I expect it will become less about the devices and more about the services.... Heck Amazon might even release a new phone powered by ECHO. The OS won't matter, only the abilities of the AI
