I was at RIM during this time and it was an absolute shitshow. It took so much in-fighting to get RIM to even address the iphone, so many people thought it was a passing fad and would never get polished enough to be a real competitor, despite the fact it was already destroying marketshare.But even then, there wasn't enough buy in from the company at large with the device, and it was certainly rushed, I think almost intentionally to try to prove the point of how "bad" touch only phones were going to be.
thedrbrian|4 years ago
> Competition rising Mike Lazaridis was at home on his treadmill and watching television when he first saw the Apple iPhone in early 2007. There were a few things he didn’t understand about the product. So, that summer, he pried one open to look inside and was shocked. It was like Apple had stuffed a Mac computer into a cellphone, he thought. To Mr. Lazaridis, a life-long tinkerer who had built an oscilloscope and computer while in high school, the iPhone was a device that broke all the rules. The operating system alone took up 700 megabytes of memory, and the device used two processors. The entire BlackBerry ran on one processor and used 32 MB. Unlike the BlackBerry, the iPhone had a fully Internet-capable browser. That meant it would strain the networks of wireless companies like AT&T Inc., something those carriers hadn’t previously allowed. RIM by contrast used a rudimentary browser that limited data usage. > Publicly, Mr. Lazaridis and Mr. Balsillie belittled the iPhone and its shortcomings, including its short battery life, weaker security and initial lack of e-mail. That earned them a reputation for being cocky and, eventually, out of touch. “That’s marketing,” Mr. Lazaridis explained. “You position your strengths against their weaknesses.” Internally, he had a very different message. “If that thing catches on, we’re competing with a Mac, not a Nokia,” he recalled telling his staff.
908B64B197|4 years ago
I think it also highlight a talent gap. Apple managed to squeeze a desktop OS on a phone, and get the best touchscreen on the market, on their first try. Blackberry couldn't even match the original iPhone two years after it's release.
Zenst|4 years ago
Oh that's for sure, even just before the iPhone came out they were all classing it as an iPod that could make calls.
What really turned things was RIM ignored the consumer market but when they started to pick on that, they did at the expense of the business base and the Storm was the end-result - half-baked for both and not fitting either. That whole period from 2007 on was a case of chasing consumer markets at the expense of the business customers. But the whole BIS/BES thang was often two sides of a coin.
But darn, the politics at Blackberry - I recall getting chastised for asking a question at a Townhall meeting when a one of the directors asked if any questions and I was balls enough to ask if we was ever going to do QA for the director to respond that they was looking into it.