Competing with a Mac

Example: Series2 TiVo - couldn't do HD like some of the cable set-top boxes, but was the first mainstream DVR and I much preferred watching a 30m show in 20m over "HD".

I think it also would have been hideously difficult for BB to dev, market and sell two entirely different kinds of devices.

I think there's really been 3 kinds of smartphones:

1) The Microsoft model - shrink a desktop down into a phone display and since everything is so little now, use a stylus to pick at things on the screen. You can definitely see an older MS smartphone and still see it as being a smartphone.

2) The BB model - optimize for most common use-cases and provide a dedicated set of physical inputs to operate. These days, feature phones pretty much do everything a BB can do, but the interface into the capabilities suck. The classic BB phone is very much a feature phone on steroids. A nicer screen, better input but good hardware build quality and excellent email services. It turns out that turing machines are turing machines and BB eventually figured out you can run other kinds of apps on the devices, but their pedigree is very much an amped up feature phone.

3) The iPhone model. Grids and capacitive touchscreens. Let's be honest here, Android started as a copy of the BB model, early Android phones even had a similar set of input mechanisms.

The iPhone model is interesting in that it was just like the Microsoft model in the sense that it was just a cheap portable computing device where "phone" was just an application on the computer. But unlike Microsoft they didn't just take the obvious route of just shrinking down the desktop into an unusable and fussy tiny screen. They developed a different kind of interface.

Also, if you squint just a tiny little bit, it looks kinda like the mobile interface model that BB used, but instead of a wheel or ball or whatever to navigate and a keyboard to type, they simplified and just did everything on a bigger screen.

Pulling these two influences together into what we have now, and being willing to deal with the tradeoffs (lack of precision input and the "feel" of a keyboard + the reduced battery life and added component cost) was really innovative and daring. It was so impressive that Google completely redirected and pivoted Android from the BB model to the iPhone model.

I think the disruption potential is easy to see, but predicting it's success impossible, because it depends almost entirely on the company's execution over the course of many years.

For example tons of people were super excited in 2007 because they had a full unix computer in their pockets. Some had the iPhone and some had a Nokia N810. The difference of course is that Apple remained focused and executed very well over the next 5 years whereas Nokia...

To use Glass as an example, it's simple: it wants to be the primary UI to your data and apps. Today you look at the output on the screen and feed it input via voice and the touch thingy, in a decade it reads your brainwaves. People aren't wed to tapping on flat rectangles any more than they were wed to keyboards and styluses.

But whether it's successful or not? No one knows, because it depends entirely on what Google does over the next 5-10 years.

Whilst I agree that Nokia and Blackberry were disrupted by Android, not the iPhone, Apple is gaining customers everywhere. 'Marketshare' is a flawed concept because it assumes a unified market of undifferentiated customers. Apple is simply not in the market of commodity devices. It never had any of that market to lose. Claiming that apple is losing those customers is clearly incorrect.

If the story does unfold as it did with Mac/Windows, Apple will again be the clear winner, just as they are in the PC market.

From the article:

While BlackBerry was guided to omit consumer features from its enterprise buyers, Nokia never secured enterprise buyers of any significance

I wonder if BlackBerry would've prospered by doubling down on enterprise buyers, maintaining their keyboards, and ignoring the consumer market. From what I can tell, BlackBerry haphazardly attacked the consumer market where Apple was the strongest.