Ex-BlackBerry Co-CEO Talks Publicly

Ex-BlackBerry Co-CEO Talks Publicly
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I can't imagine it happening. Enterprise IT isn't isolated from the rest of society (although it sometimes feels that way). When the rest of the world moved on to touchscreens, Blackberry would have been left behind anyway.

They then got complacent upon the business side and then ended up going in a panic as they used the share price as a indicator and not feedback of how things were going and with that had extra delays in seeing what was wrong.

They also had some nice wifi VOIP features but telco's prevented those from coming live in 2007 and would of helped greatly for business and consumer side at a time in which hotspots and wifi was becoming fruitful.

This alienating of business users and many missed opportunities, for one being rolling there own datacentre box instead of an expensive bolt-on for microsoft Exchange would of opened up other non Exchange based markets more and also given a firmer presence and toe-hold in a company.

Sad part was I was working there upto 2007 and had chatted with a director (late 2006) about the alienating the business market chasing the consumer one and we know how that went. But still pains me how the management were more into being seen to be good than actually being good and with that was two types, those who were technical and those who were not and the latter sadly had more say and less ears.

Then the other big aspect that hit Blackberry would be 3G, on 2G they beat everything with their own data protocol optimised for low-usage and needing telco's to have there own server to handle the custom UDP packets, which upon a device you would find under the books, which was there teminology for protocol handler/translation upon the device. Now when 3G started the whole pulling emails become more easier, less need for high cost 2G usage, and whilst 3G not as cheap it allowed more saturation very quickly to reduce those costs and mature at a time just right for Apple in many parts as well as others.

Another avenue they had was blackberry connect which would run upon other devices (windows phones, nokia's and the like) which would handle the blackberry custome protocol to allow emails using as little 2G data as possible, this whole area was one they did not invest in and started cutting back at a time when things were about to change. Again more aggressive deals and less arrogance about position in the market would of done huge favours and they could of been the go to email provider of Apple and the World, but they did not.

It is if almost they went thru a phase of picking the bad decisions at the worst time and hd they rolled dice would of had better luck in direction.

Still, to admit failure is good for a CEO, albeit few many years late. But Jim was one of the better ones, managment wise.