[RubberChicken76]

Or are you saying that it would take a insanely high amount of effort to do this? All I am trying to discuss is how that effort compares to the effort of making a new OS, and other consequences of the descision.

Probably a lot more effort to bring it to where it needed to be and it would have likely really mucked backwards compatibility anyway.

[MarsupilamiX]

That's only proof of their incompetence, after all, BB10 is a big failure.

10 years of time to fail, vs 3 quarters.
That's the difference and I already said that to you in at least 3 other threads.
BB10 was a commercial failure, yes.
That doesn't change the fact of BBOS being an anachronism from another time.
It also doesn't change the fact of BBOS being completely unsuited for modern smartphone uses. Proven by the sheer number of people not buying a BBOS phone, since BlackBerry got some real competition. You know, the other minority of the market, constituting 99%?

It gets boring to repeat the same things over and over again.
If you can't fix your OS in 10 years of time, it either means that you have the biggest count of the most incompetent of employees in the smartphone sector, or your OS is unfixable.

Nokia had Symbian and S40.
They abandoned both platforms, because they understood the same thing as BlackBerry did.
Sony Ericsson abandoned Symbian and their in-house OS as well.
Motorola did the same.
Not to forget Samsung.
Even MS abandoned Windows Mobile.

All of these manufacturers have one thing in common:
They had an OS that wasn't suited for the current market paradigm.
And you really suggest, that BlackBerry is the only exception that could have continued with BBOS?

Posted via CB10

[GoJaysGo]

A radical shift was needed because it was clear that the OS and legacy devices was not going to save them. ...

Legacy devices are the ONLY thing that is saving BlackBerry at the moment, so your statement is incorrect. Legacy BB OS still out sells BB10...

[belfastdispatcher]

10 years of time to fail, vs 3 quarters.
That's the difference and I already said that to you in at least 3 other threads.
BB10 was a commercial failure, yes.
That doesn't change the fact of BBOS being an anachronism from another time.
It also doesn't change the fact of BBOS being completely unsuited for modern smartphone uses. Proven by the sheer number of people not buying a BBOS phone, since BlackBerry got some real competition. You know, the other minority of the market, constituting 99%?

It gets boring to repeat the same things over and over again.
If you can't fix your OS in 10 years of time, it either means that you have the biggest count of the most incompetent of employees in the smartphone sector, or your OS is unfixable.

Nokia had Symbian and S40.
They abandoned both platforms, because they understood the same thing as BlackBerry did.
Sony Ericsson abandoned Symbian and their in-house OS as well.
Motorola did the same.
Not to forget Samsung.
Even MS abandoned Windows Mobile.

All of these manufacturers have one thing in common:
They had an OS that wasn't suited for the current market paradigm.
And you really suggest, that BlackBerry is the only exception that could have continued with BBOS?

Posted via CB10

Boring? Nobody is asking you to keep repeating your boring opinion. It's your kind of attitude, the all or nothing attitude, that got BB in so much trouble over BB10.

Should've been happy with slow but sustainable growth until they really had a revolutionary product.

[MarsupilamiX]

Are you claiming that it was IMPOSSIBLE to make BBOS use more ram, have a front facing camera, not crash as much, perform faster, make it easier to code apps for, etc? Or are you saying that it would take a insanely high amount of effort to do this? All I am trying to discuss is how that effort compares to the effort of making a new OS, and other consequences of the decision.

They weren't able to fix the OS in the last 10+ years.
The answer is right there.

Compared to the competition, when BBOS7 launched, the OS already was outdated.
BBOS on my 9810, after 10 years of commercial availability, couldn't even compete with the iPhone 4 or the Galaxy S2. Even though the 9810 came out 1 year later, than both of these phones.

I'm sure that it wasn't impossible to add more RAM, a FFC or a faster processor.
But I am also sure that it was and is impossible, to get BBOS to perform on the level of the competition.

Posted via CB10

[extisis]

Legacy devices are the ONLY thing that is saving BlackBerry at the moment, so your statement is incorrect. Legacy BB OS still out sells BB10...

why would the only thing keeping BBRY afloat has a December 2015 deadline? weird.. sales don't really say anything. It just says hey, these poorer people in 3rd world countries are creating more sales for dead devices than the sales you create for BB10 in large markets. funny how people take that whole bit of legacy devices trumping bb10 sales and think it's such a vital part of "Moving forward".

[belfastdispatcher]

They weren't able to fix the OS in the last 10+ years.
The answer is right there.

Compared to the competition, when BBOS7 launched, the OS already was outdated.
BBOS on my 9810, after 10 years of commercial availability, couldn't even compete with the iPhone 4 or the Galaxy S2. Even though the 9810 came out 1 year later, than both of these phones.

I'm sure that it wasn't impossible to add more RAM, a FFC or a faster processor.
But I am also sure that it was and is impossible, to get BBOS to perform on the level of the competition.

Posted via CB10

Are you kidding me? Have you ever had an early BB device in your hand? Those things ran on less then 10mb memory. BBOS was improved 1000 times over,

Thy fixed BBOS many times before and try could've done it again.

[MarsupilamiX]

Boring? Nobody is asking you to keep repeating your boring opinion. It's your kind of attitude, the all or nothing attitude, that got BB in so much trouble over BB10.

Should've been happy with slow but sustainable growth until they really had a revolutionary product.

The only thing that really bores me, is that you repeat your opinions, even though a large number of them has already been busted by facts.
But you love the role of the martyr, we all know that.

I also have no all-or-nothing attitude.
Today, nearly 3 years after the 9900, we know where the market wanted to go.
The market went with a 99% to non-BBOS phones.
There was and is no sustainable growth for BBOS.
Neither in the year 2011, where it became clear that the competition completely destroyed BlackBerry with their offerings.
Nor today, where a 70$ Android/WP8 phone completely outclasses every BBOS phone you can buy (ignoring enterprise needs of course).

My attitude is completely irrelevant for the analysis of what the market decided.
When I say that BBOS is an anachronism, the market proves it for me.
My personal opinion, or my attitude, make no difference whatsoever.
I actually entered the territory of facts with certain statements I made.

That you still think (if you really do that, or if you only continue with your role of the martyr, is something I do not know though) that there was growth for BBOS, after the generation of phones that the iPhone 4 and the Galaxy S2 have foreshadowed, is such an absurd thought.
The market proves that opinion wrong, anyhow.

Posted via CB10

[Superfly_FR]

BBOS is over and it appears BB10 is also over, at least for consumers. How many quarters do you think they go on with only selling a million BB10 devices?

(You don't have to rinse an repeat)
Maybe you could also consider that maybe none of these 1 Million customers would have spent a dime for a BBOS device (hint : roughly 50% were non BB users) ... But of course, we'll slip OT in seconds. And we don't want that, don't we ?

OP question is "did they need a new OS ?".
I believe many here have given their POV about this, I'd sum up in a few words : "BBOS is exhausted".
In your POV, hardware and fine tuning could have patched that. (I do not agree, at all).
The fact that you pulled the thread to a "it was better before" kind of rant does not answer the question either.
So, I believe it's not really useful to multiply (or repeat) arguments endlessly.

You might prefer BBOS to BB10 and find the features and/or app catalog is greater; it's a no brainer since BB announced they will maintain it for a long period.
By then, people feeling the same than you can enjoy the "pure" trackpad&buttons keyboard layout and the spinning wheel no problem.
Then, in a few months, "at best", they might consider enjoying what I belive now 200-500% more efficient than my BBOS devices (9000-9360-9900) have ever been. They were excellent phones and BBM but failovers for anything else to me, while my Z30 is my daily work companion.

[joeldf]

That's only proof of their incompetence, after all, BB10 is a big failure.

Could'a, would'a, should'a...

Doesn't really matter anymore. RIM/BlackBerry did what they did, and we got what we got.

A BlackBerry user since 2007, my current Z10 is only my third BlackBerry. The original Pearl 8100 being the first, and the Torch 9800 being the other. So my BBOS experience is limited to 4.2/4.5 on the 8100, and 6 on the 9800 (eagerly awaited for 6.1 before the crushing news that RIM was jumping to 7 and the 9800 wasn't going to get it).

While I loved the features of the OS (and, BTW, I found Social Feeds useless, but felt BB News was great), I always hated the performance.

I was hopeful about BB10, but got worried once it came out and hearing about all the features I loved that were missing.

I also remember a lot of proponents around here acting as if it was those features that lost BB their users. Not true. Those features are what kept BB the user's they still had. It was other things about the OS - poor performance and lack of consumer-friendly (or, popular, if you wish) app availability that lost them most of the users.

For businesses, it was Apple's addition of Exchange ActiveSync to the iPhone that did it. My firm dumped BES and all the company supplied BBs as fast as they could once the iPhone got EAS, and I'm sure we weren't the only ones. BES was just an additional cost on top of already maintaining an Exchange email server that was seen as an easy cut as the economy in general was slowly cutting into the firm's bottom line.

The extensively granular notification customization is something I'm still waiting on (individual notification volume control is still high on my wish list), but once "allow calls in bedside mode" finally showed up, that's when I went for the Z10.

Now, with 10.2.1, I've got many of the same apps as my wife does on her iPhone 4 (the android versions, of course), and my son's Galaxy S 2.

I don't think BlackBerry went about the OS transition the right way, for sure. But I also don't think they could patch the old OS enough to keep up with the Androids and iOSs out there.

As to the memory requirements/limitations of BBOS, I'll only say this...

768MB?

That's a weird number to go with. All the previous BBs followed the usual doubling of memory. My 8100 had 64MB. I think some of the Curves had 128MB. The 9100, 9300 and 9700 had 256MB. The 9380, 9800 and 9780 had 512MB.

Sure, there were a few oddball models. The Pearl Flip is listed to have 75MB. Could just be a division of ram and rom that totals 128MB, but only reports one of them as 75.

But then all the OS7 phones (9790, 9810, 9850/60 and 9900/30) got 756MB? Why not a full 1GB since that's the next typical module size?

32bit Windows XP can supposedly take 4GB of ram max. But put 4GB on the machine, and it can only see about 3.5GB. That's it. Why it sees all 2 of a machine loaded with exactly 2GB of ram, I don't know. But it doesn't seem to need that extra 0.5GB when it only has 1, 2 or 3GBs. But load it up to 4, and suddenly it it can't see it all.

Maybe that's the same with BBOS.

I'm just guessing of course.

Posted via CB10

[MarsupilamiX]

Are you kidding me? Have you ever had an early BB device in your hand? Those things ran on less then 10mb memory. BBOS was improved 1000 times over,

Thy fixed BBOS many times before and try could've done it again.

Now, let's try to understand what I actually wrote, shall we?

I said, that BBOS won't be able to perform like the competition.
That it would perform worse.

What did I use as proof?
The 9810 I had. That I compared with the iPhone 4 and Galaxy S2.
The 9810, had an OS that has been commercially available on BlackBerry products, for about 10 years. It was in its 7th major iteration, even though a lot of people actually knowing what OS7 is, call it 6.1.

I then said that the iPhone 4, having an OS that is commercially available for 3 years, completely outclasses the 9810, that even came out one year after the iPhone 4.

I never said that BlackBerry didn't improve the OS.
They surely did.
It's just that BBOS has never been improved to the point of it performing better or on par with the competition, in the areas most smartphone users deem necessary.

This is strange, when you have 10 years of time to do it though.
And if you have as much potential as you try to suggest.

Posted via CB10

[jegs2]

I just read about supporting BB7 indefintely, and it makes me wonder, why did BB need to change OS's at all? I mean, there are a lot of things I like about bb10, but when I look at my 9900, I don't really see why they couldnt have modified the OS instead of creating a whole new one and burning a whole 2-3 years doing so.

For those of you that know a bit more of what would be involved, would it have been easier to:

introduce the peek and flow concepts to BBOS,
make BBOS crash less
and upgrade the ram and cpu to work at an acceptable speed?

I love BB10, but when I loook at my 9900, I think all it needed was a LOT more speed (ram and cpu), some more stability, a non crappy camera, and a lot more apps. How hard would it have been for them to do this instead of building a whole new os?

Or did they really just hit a wall with the OS and they couldnt improve it anymore? It seems unfortunate for BB to have two OS's to support.

Yep. It all reminds me of Palm's deep-sixing of Palm OS in favor of Web OS. Those who had all the applications for Palm OS were left on the outside if they wanted to upgrade to a Pre, and they had to purchase all those applications again to work on the new OS.

And then the new OS wasn't as efficient and user-friendly as the older Palm OS.

Meanwhile, other phones out there were using operating systems with more available applications, while Palm asked developers to write applications for Web OS. There were too few takers. See any parallels?

It was an answer to a question nobody asked, and Palm went the way of the Dodo.

[RubberChicken76]

Legacy devices are the ONLY thing that is saving BlackBerry at the moment, so your statement is incorrect. Legacy BB OS still out sells BB10...

And declining every quarter also. It isn't saving them. At best, it's bailing some of the water out with a rusty bucket.

[RubberChicken76]

And then the new OS wasn't as efficient and user-friendly as the older Palm OS.

That's also a matter of opinion.

[MarsupilamiX]

Yep. It all reminds me of Palm's deep-sixing of Palm OS in favor of Web OS. Those who had all the applications for Palm OS were left on the outside if they wanted to upgrade to a Pre, and they had to purchase all those applications again to work on the new OS.

And then the new OS wasn't as efficient and user-friendly as the older Palm OS.

Meanwhile, other phones out there were using operating systems with more available applications, while Palm asked developers to write applications for Web OS. There were too few takers. See any parallels?

It was an answer to a question nobody asked, and Palm went the way of the Dodo.

Let's take a quick look at the book called smartphone history:



You see the green line? Symbian? That was mostly Nokia's baby, even though Samsung and Sony Ericsson had some phones with the OS.

Anyhow, let's look at the year WebOs failed and look where Nokia stands.
The Palm Pre happened in 2009.
A year where Symbian (Nokia) still had 50% of the market.
Theoretically, we could say that Nokia will never lose that userbase, as long as they keep improving Nokia S60 (aka Symbian).

Funnily enough, Nokia tried exactly that, improving an OS that wasn't made for a modern smartphone paradigm, and they weren't able to.
The performance of a S60 compared to an iPhone 4, was ridiculously bad.
And their customers changed ship, to manufacturers that could give the UX they wanted.

The parallel to BlackBerry is a pretty simple one:
They tried to modify their OS as much as possible to compete with Android and iOS but ultimately failed.
Which brought forth the acquisition of QNX.
If BB10 itself was the right answer, is debatable.
If they needed to change OS, isn't though.

Posted via CB10

[sleepngbear]

That's well true but there's no reason we can't have a conversation about it.

Bringing BB10 into the conversation turns it into a BBOS vs BB10 discussion, which clouds the real issue of the OP's question, which essentially is about BBOS vs the rest of the market. The former has been done to death and is an entirely different discussion from the latter.

[sleepngbear]

I don't get what is so hard to understand here.

You say "It had reached the end of the road" but then you also say "BB7 was a bandaid to keep the ship afloat". But what if it wasn't a band aid? What if all there efforts were in it and onto even BB8?

Are you claiming that it was IMPOSSIBLE to make BBOS use more ram, have a front facing camera, not crash as much, perform faster, make it easier to code apps for, etc? Or are you saying that it would take a insanely high amount of effort to do this? All I am trying to discuss is how that effort compares to the effort of making a new OS, and other consequences of the decision.

The limitations of BBOS have been discussed at great length in this and hundreds of other threads. Despite the shortcomings of previous leadership, I am absolutely positive that if there were any way to modernize BBOS to the point of competitiveness more cost-effectively than developing an entirely new platform and the ensuing pains associated with transitioning to it, they would have done exactly that. The fact is, Mike and Jim, the virtual parents of BBOS, themselves came to the conclusion that BBOS was not the future of the company. If that doesn't tell you all you need to know, I don't know what will.

[MarsupilamiX]

Bringing BB10 into the conversation turns it into a BBOS vs BB10 discussion, which clouds the real issue of the OP's question, which essentially is about BBOS vs the rest of the market. The former has been done to death and is an entirely different discussion from the latter.

Very well said.
This is also the reason why I compared my 9810 with the iPhone 4 and the Galaxy S2.
Or why I talked about Nokia and how similar their situations were, when both faced serious competition.

When we compare BBOS with the rest of the market, we see that the OS after more or less10 years of commercial availability, has already run its course against operating systems that were available for only 3 years on the marketplace.

This alone tells a very important story, and actually answers the question of the OP.
BB10 itself, is completely irrelevant for the conclusion that BlackBerry needed a new OS.

Posted via CB10

[extisis]

Very well said.
This is also the reason why I compared my 9810 with the iPhone 4 and the Galaxy S2.
Or why I talked about Nokia and how similar their situations were, when both faced serious competition.

When we compare BBOS with the rest of the market, we see that the OS after more or less10 years of commercial availability, has already run its course against operating systems that were available for only 3 years on the marketplace.

This alone tells a very important story, and actually answers the question of the OP.
BB10 itself, is completely irrelevant for the conclusion that BlackBerry needed a new OS.

Posted via CB10

you've beaten the hell out of this horse but you've made very good points.

[sleepngbear]

Boring? Nobody is asking you to keep repeating your boring opinion. It's your kind of attitude, the all or nothing attitude, that got BB in so much trouble over BB10.

Should've been happy with slow but sustainable growth until they really had a revolutionary product.

Would be a valid argument if there were actually any growth. Selling better than its successor is disappointing and unexpected after three quarters, but it is not growth.

[belfastdispatcher]

Would be a valid argument if there were actually any growth. Selling better than its successor is disappointing and unexpected after three quarters, but it is not growth.

Again, this thread is in the PAST, when the decision to go build a brand new OS was made.

Let's put it back in context she'll we? Up to that time and after the user base was still growing and they were still making profits regardless of the market share shrinking.

[MarsupilamiX]

you've beaten the hell out of this horse but you've made very good points.

Thank you.
You're probably correct, when you say that this kinda got repetitive

Posted via CB10

[MarsupilamiX]

Again, this thread is in the PAST, when the decision to go build a brand new OS was made.

Let's put it back in context she'll we? Up to that time and after the user base was still growing and they were still making profits regardless of the market share shrinking.

The userbase growth stopped after OS7.
The reasons lie in differences of ecosystem, hardware capabilities and software capabilities.
All things, in which other operating systems excel.
Userbase shrinkage and losses happened under OS7, even though BB10 didn't even have a release date.
What's more to analyse here?

We are all on topic, except for you, who once again has to start a BB10 vs BBOS situation with his posts.
This thread is a question of BBOS vs any other OS, that one could imagine.

And in that scenario, looking at how the market developed and which developments could have been foreseeable while OS6 was still new, it is clear that BlackBerry needed a new OS.
To even ask the question, if it was needed, and to doubt that, shows such an immense disconnect with the current market realities.

Posted via CB10

[BigBadWulf]

I really like to pop in a thread, and not see personal attacks tossed about, by the same old save old. Aren't y'all getting tired of typing that crap?

[sleepngbear]

The historical proof so far is that RAM has increased with every new generation, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the RAM is the last generation was the limit.

This is also supported about how they kept all other specs to a minimum compared to other platforms at the same time. BlackBerrys have always been a few years back in the specs race. Example, while Curve 8300 was top of the line you could buy HTC with 3G, GPS complete with tomtom navigation, wifi, front facing camera complete with video calling.

There is absolutely no reason to believe it was the most the OS could support.

Do you remember MS DOS? 640K RAM limit. That was it. You could throw megs of RAM on the mother board, but DOS could only recognize 640K. They threw Windows on top of it to fool it into thinking it could use 1 MB, then 2 MB, and then things got ugly and they had to rewrite the OS kernel to actually efficiently use more RAM. Even then, several versions of Windows still had limitations as to how much memory could be addressed, though they would usually reach the point of diminishing returns (where adding more memory got increasingly inefficient) long before they hit the addressing limit. It took a few major rewrites of the OS to be able to efficiently use GB's of RAM (and ironically, the more it was able to address, the more it needed as a minimum to run well). Back in the day, we thought we could do anything with 640K; try running even the most basic of today's mobile OS's on that. Think of the java-based BBOS as compared to newer mobile OS's in terms of the old MS DOS compared to even Windows NT. No platform is limitless. Even the most state-of-the-art OS's of today will eventually reach a point of maturity where they simply cannot be developed any further.