Originally Posted by
Omnitech My opinion? Because it is a dated, limited architecture, tied closely to an outdated and limited OS, using highly proprietary connectors and middleware that is either largely unnecessary today, or creates its own labor and maintenance and compatibility and scalability problems.
The company has limited resources, and focusing those limited resources on more widely-used and standardized protocols is really the only reasonable choice, especially when the potential benefits of the legacy platform are so limited outside the myopia of the old-school "True BlackBerry Believers". It was that clinging to the past that was the downfall of the previous management of Lazaridis and Balsillie, they clearly didn't need more of that.
Where the company made mistakes in BB10 development included dropping certain legacy functionality that could have been implemented in BB10 but was let go because of a design philosophy that revolved around trying to ape iOS and "simplify the user experience", which I think they basically failed to achieve.
Not only do I think they failed to simplify it without handicapping it and producing in some cases an ergonomic disaster, they also needlessly left out features in the interest of "simplification" that would have been relatively easy to implement, but got the axe. Some of those features they eventually brought back ("delete on handheld/server" email choice, PIN messaging, ability to compose plaintext emails, etc.), but I take issue over what they brought back and how well the ones they brought back were implemented.
In a nutshell, they appear to have fired most of the legacy engineering staff and tried to re-implement everything from scratch, often using staff that seemingly had no experience with the kind of thing they were designing from the ground up. They bit off more than they could chew, and it might have worked out but the whole thing was not very well managed. I don't know if it was a basic skillset problem, management problem, morale problem or what.
All that said, I really like BB10 in various ways, I just have a fairly long mental shortlist of all the "Doh!" things that really should have been done better. :)