Jack Rivlin
Jack Rivlin is the editor of The Tab, an online tabloid for students which is "neither clever nor funny", according to the Guardian (it isn't PC enough). He is a former Evening Standard news reporter. You can find his earlier posts here
How did Blackberry get away with being rubbish for so long?
By
Jack Rivlin Mobile
Last updated: September 27th, 2013
160 Comments
Sometimes things fail, and it’s not because of market forces or bad luck, it’s because the product is just rubbish. Blackberry, once the pioneers of having loads of stuff you don’t need on your phone, is struggling to stay afloat as various suitors blow hot and cold with the prospect of a takeover. Blackberry hasn’t failed yet, but it lost $84 million last quarter and announced 5,000 job cuts last year. T-Mobile has just announced it will stop stocking their phones in the USA due to low consumer demand.
It is a miracle that Blackberry made it this far. In boardrooms, labs and City desks they talk of a changing landscape and a declining market share, but any teenager could tell you the blunt truth about why Blackberry is sinking: their phones are really rubbish, and have been for a while.
Blackberry’s developers, Research in Motion (Rim), were kings of the smartphone world just four years ago, because they made email on your phone easy. They sold phones to businessmen first, then businessmen’s children, then everyone. And then they … stopped. The iPhone came out, Androids came out, and Blackberry were still trying to persuade people to use their app-less, underpowered mini computers.
At the key moment, Rim chose to ignore the huge consumer appeal of opening up their platform to app developers. Instead, they stuck with reliability and (on most models) a Qwerty keyboard, leaving their phones’ software feeling hopelessly old fashioned. Have you used Google Maps on a Blackberry? The navigation app, possibly the most useful app of all, is reduced to a bizarre game where you must drive a crosshair across a map that looks like it’s been photocopied out of an old geography textbook. It’s like trying to read an A-Z while looking the wrong way through a pair of binoculars.
And that’s one of the apps it actually has. All of the sexy add-ons which sell most phones are curiously missing from the Curves, Pearls and Storms. Somehow the company seemed to think top notch security and a well-regarded email client would be enough to hold on to their market share. That hope became total fantasy once the Blackberry network started going down at random across the world. Forget sexy, they couldn’t even do sensible any more. The London riots – where Blackberry Messenger was used to coordinate looting – proved not to be the company’s low point, but its high water mark.
From top to bottom, Blackberry users are ditching their phones in droves. Barack Obama, for so long the company’s unofficial ambassador, now prefers an iPad, according to their advisers. Even my father, he of enormous fumbling fingers and no patience, is buying a touch screen Samsung.
The last preserve of Blackberry users, the chunky fingered late adopters, are now ditching the device too. The company may still be worth billions for now but the game is up.
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How did Blackberry get away with being rubbish for so long? – Telegraph Blogs
