New Film 'BlackBerry' To Explore Rise and Fall of Canadian Smartphone (www.cbc.ca) 81
The rise and catastrophic fall of what was once Canada's most valuable company is set for the big screen. CBC.ca reports: Blackberry will tell the story of Waterloo, Ont.-based Research in Motion (RIM), creators of the titular device, which for a time was the world's most popular smartphone. The film stars Canadian actor Jay Baruchel as company co-founder Mike Lazaridis and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Glenn Howerton as co-CEO Jim Balsillie. The film was adapted from the 2015 book Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry, by Sean Silcoff and Jacquie McNish. Toronto's Matt Johnson directs and also appears in the film as RIM's other co-founder, Doug Fregin. The cast also includes Cary Elwes, Saul Rubinek and Michael Ironside.
RIM was founded in 1984 by business partners Lazaridis and Fregin, who had previously worked together on a failed LED sign business. After a decade of dabbling in various other technology projects, they turned their attention to the two-way communications systems that would become the foundation for the BlackBerry device.
RIM was founded in 1984 by business partners Lazaridis and Fregin, who had previously worked together on a failed LED sign business. After a decade of dabbling in various other technology projects, they turned their attention to the two-way communications systems that would become the foundation for the BlackBerry device.
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I wonder how they'd do if they converted to a finger-based UI faster. The "finger thing" seemed to be cool feature everyone wanted, fair or not. Often chasing the Jonesdashians is more profitable than quality, unfortunately. Damned humans.
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I feel this sentiment, but also I think "meh, they were their own undoing".
Blackberry failed to innovate during the most recent tremulous period of cellphone handsets, so they found themselves becoming irrelevant over the next decade. Iirc, they had an android build near the end, but it was way too late for them, their heyday of bbm exclusivity had passed, and Apple stole a page from their own book and brought BBM exclusivity/fomo directly into the SMS space, so they could suck up the last of the SMS users
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They are kind of like the Commodore of smart phones: had all right pieces to the puzzle but ate them.
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> Looking back, the only truly sad part about it that I reliably find is how they completely missed how important the mobile OS was was about to be, and how they failed entirely by simply not participating.
Hubris played an important part as well. When the iPhone was released, one of them was quoted in all the local (Ontario) papers stating something to the effect that "We've been making phones for years, Apple is new to the game, we know how to do this and they don't."
I knew as soon as I read that statem
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They are right about the fact iPhone didn't initially sell well for businesses, but iPhone surfed on the huge consumer market they created, giving them cash for business domain R&D.
> "no one is ever going to put up with Apple's lack of security"
Consumers valued "cool" over security, for good or bad.
> [iPhone lacks] keyboard
They misunderstood how quickly consumers adopted to "screen boards". My daughter started with a keyboarded phone and quickly picked up iPhone's approach. Granted, a kid will tol
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I read an article about the fall of RIM a while back and it made them appear as less bumbling as people think. Upper management might have been slightly dismissive of the iPhone when it was announced but when they got one, they saw the danger. Without a keyboard, Apple was able to put more battery and electronics into a tiny package. It was designed more for consumers which represented a far larger market than business users.
While RIM had an ecosystem for the phones, it was far more kludgy and cobbled toget
Re: Blackberry Passport (Score:2)
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My point about the battery is not the original iPhone had the best battery life. As a manufacturer of smart phones themselves, RIM opening up the first generation of a competitor's product and finding the level of optimization and engineering that already existed sent alarms. From their initial perspective, Apple might know how to make MP3 players but smart phones were another level. RIM would have thought they had more time to combat Apple. Not only was Apple further ahead than they thought, Apple was only
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Same here, at the time I held one, in a pre-android era.
Compared to the feature-phones of the late-90s/early-2000s, Blackberry was well above the status quo.
But, compared to the phones of today, they are shit.
In fact, I wrote a thesis paper about how their entire company would roll up into a little ball and disappear from the public eye, just like it did. It's been mildly fulfilling to watch my theory come to life over the last decade, but I would have rather seen them keep up their past pace. The world cou
Wow. (Score:1)
Really scraping the bottom of the barrel for Canadian cultural film grant fodder...
Insufficient greed! Die! Die! DIE! (Score:3)
My take on the sad story is that the system is so broken that honest work, good products, and even sustained profits are no excuse now. The penalty for insufficient greed is death. (But I think Nokia was a sadder story, even though the company didn't die as completely. Relatively friendly environment?)
Also loss of freedom. No one can choose BlackBerry now, no matter how well it might match your needs. My own fixation is on freedom maximization, so these days I object to the games that are rigged for profit maximization über alles. More choice and more innovation and more freedom are also important things to think about.
Actually, it's quite rare when profit maximization should be the only criteria, but it's completely insane when the profit maximization is based on guessing about the future stock prices driving capital flows hither and yon. No one knows the future. Even the "smartest" computers are just guessing a few milliseconds into the future.
Maybe that should be the basis of a joke, but I can barely recognize a funny joke when I stumble over one. Certainly can't recall the last time I wrote a good one, though sometimes I get a laugh in conversation...
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Really? Blackberry's sucked. They were just the best at the time. But the moment Apple did the obvious thing and make the whole screen touch - and the years that it took blackberry to fail to do that - spelled their doom. If they had moonshot a full touchscreen solution in a year, people might still be using them today. Hell, it took five years for them to give up on the built in qwerty keyboard. Which is exactly how long it took until they lost ALL their momentum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
http [pocket-lint.com]
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Glad to hear your thinking represents the apogee of evolution. The rest of us peasants might as well just give up now.
"Think differently." What a sad joke that phrase has become.
Do you know about the early job titles at Apple?
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I was supporting about 30 or so Blackberries when iPhones happened, and I wouldn't describe them as "sucky" as much as they were suddenly from the past.
My boss did some dodgy deal with our ISP and got 4 iPhones the week they arrived in our country, and there was a queue at the IT department door once people saw them in action.
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Actually, my point would be that ALL people differently, even uniquely. Therefore there are some people for whom the BlackBerry way of doing things is most compatible or even most productive--but they don't have the freedom to buy that kind of tool anymore, do they?
I don't actually care that much about this particular brand. The BlackBerry way of doing things didn't seem to suit me, so I never investigated it that deeply. However the story reminds me of the PDA fiasco. I never had a Palm, but rather a Sony
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*sigh*
s/people differently/people think differently/
Must have editorially stumbled over the the transition from an original form such as "people are different, even unique".
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I should not feed the trolls (Score:2)
Glad to hear your thinking represents the apogee of evolution. The rest of us peasants might as well just give up now.
Sorry - do you actually disagree with anything I said?
"Think differently." What a sad joke that phrase has become.
Good grief. If you're gonna piss on a marketing campaign that nobody gives a shit about [any more] - and which was *staggeringly* successful at the time, at least get it right. "Think different."
Do you know about the early job titles at Apple?
No? Why would I care?
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NAK
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Good to know. Adding 'em to the list.
Re: Insufficient greed! Die! Die! DIE! (Score:3)
The other thing that did them in was the advent of relatively cheap, fast, and comparatively plentiful mobile data. Back in the days of GPRS, BES and their back-end infrastructure was a huge advantage. The BES integrated with your exchange infrastructure (and potentially lotus notes?) and then sent secure/encrypted data back to RIM. RIM would then send what amounted to a specially crafted SMS to your device pushing the data (or at least notification) to it.
In enterprise and government situations it was grea
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That's fair - but the writing was on the wall: TCP/IP was coming to phones, and it was going to happen fast. Because anything that didn't do that was going to be dust.
I remember various subsets of HTML and HTTP that folks were dreaming up back in the day - and I couldn't believe anyone would spend the time. Before anyone actually adapted it, it was clear that networking was going to catch up and nobody was going to do an implementation in another language just to support tiny phones.
Turns out I was at lea
Re: Insufficient greed! Die! Die! DIE! (Score:2)
Ther was nothing honest about RIM.
RIM negotiated contracts which were designed to limit the availability of data to their competitors. RIM used specific technology that made their devices more efficient with very limited bandwidth than the competitors.
That itself would have been fine, but their contracts forbid the availability of bandwidth to their competitors.
Fuck RIM
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My take on the sad story is that the system is so broken that honest work, good products, and even sustained profits are no excuse now.
You seem to ignore the part where others built a better product that the public wanted. Horse carriage makers can also complain how the system is broken too after being replaced by automobiles. After all making a horse carriage is honest work too.
Also loss of freedom. No one can choose BlackBerry now, no matter how well it might match your needs. My own fixation is on freedom maximization, so these days I object to the games that are rigged for profit maximization über alles. More choice and more innovation and more freedom are also important things to think about.
I think you are confusing freedom with entitlement. You are free to choose whatever cell phone you want. Manufacturers have the freedom to make the phone they want to make. You are not entitled to the phone you want them to make.
Maybe that should be the basis of a joke, but I can barely recognize a funny joke when I stumble over one. Certainly can't recall the last time I wrote a good one, though sometimes I get a laugh in conversation...
It is your choice to yell at kids on
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Public masturbation of 672806 (Score:2)
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Shanen's cowardice larger than his intellect (Score:2)
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Shanen too afraid to answer (Score:2)
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Still Shanen, still empty (Score:2)
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Shanen still counting his emptiness (Score:2)
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Computer, status of shanen's ideas (Score:2)
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Deep Thought, what is meaning of shanen's ideas (Score:2)
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The computer has been constructed (Score:2)
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Sadly the ultimate computer was destroyed (Score:2)
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The hyperspace bypass (Score:2)
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Actually, it's quite rare when profit maximization should be the only criteria...
Not with publicly traded (stock market) companies. They have a fiduciary duty to maximize the profits of their investors. Board members could be in trouble if they tried to place - say, minimizing environmental harm - above maximizing profits.
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NAK.
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What the hell. What about all the rest. (Score:2)
They did have a excellent phone though at the time.
I miss real keys (Score:3)
Give me a modern OS and a nice big screen and a real keyboard now though and I would buy it in a second. Like a Galaxy Fold, but with a real keyboard on one (in)side and a Note size screen on the other (like the old Nokia 9210 - basically like a tiny pocketsize laptop). Bonus points for a screen on the outside too, so you can use it for many tasks without unfolding it.
We can always hope, right?
Re: I miss real keys (Score:3)
There is a really nice looking one coming next month. Pricey though.
https://www.fxtec.com/ [fxtec.com]
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i miss the real keyboard also. :-( :-(
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Marketing Fail (Score:1)
If only BlackBerry's marketing team had placed free advertisements at the end of every user's emails that say "Sent from my BlackBerry.". They missed the free exposure that would cause people to buy BB devices to be one with the herd.
Awesome for a while (Score:2)
There. No need to see it.
Kind of a Mini Nortel Story (Score:1)
ode to my world edition (Score:2)
one feature you can't find in smartphones today that the blackberry had was the speed-dial feature. you can program any one of the keys to a preset number and even with the devices locked down you can still hold the device in your pocket, press the key of your choice (because you knew by memory and touch which key it was) and you can speedial your way out of a sticky situation if you needed.
my coworkers and i programmed our numbers with each other and if we ever needed an emergency or to be bailed out from
Essentially they never understood what they had (Score:2)
The early Blackberries were essentially "mobile terminals". When they started, that was a rather empty niche. Unfortunately they never opened their systems which meant that the only use for them was "mobile outlook".... and even that required you to either send your mail through a service they provided, or to install their proprietary software with high access rights.
If they had opened their terminal protocol, they would have had a whole range of new markets. For example their terminals could have been inte
Blackberry, eh? (Score:2)
Why RIM/Blackberry Failed? (Score:2)
If you want the inside story of why Blackberry is failing [theglobeandmail.com], read this article.
It was the kernel that was later expanded by its authors to the book which the movie is based on.
Fascinating read for any tech enthusiast, watching how RIM was over confident while Apple, then Google, gobbled up market and mind share ...
When it was all about the RIM-job (Score:1)
I studied software engineering at McMaster, which is about an hour from Waterloo where RIM was headquartered. Back then in the early aughts RIM was the 800-pound gorilla, a huge employer of graduates and attracted a ton of students to both software eng and comp sci programs in the region, even as the dot com bust was slowing down the entire industry. I never got a RIM-job myself and went on to build my career in the U.S. but the stories I heard of the mismanagement and eventual tanking of RIM were super dep
US patent law did not help (Score:2)
One thing that really didn't help them was having to fight off a huge lawsuit from a US patent troll. The fact that they were a Canadian company probably did not help them in the US court system.
While they were distracted by fighting in court, American companies like Apple and Google were busy innovating and taking away their market share from them.
I wonder when the next Canadian tech giant is due to rise and fall, following in the shoes of Nortel and Blackberry?