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An Open Letter To Customers

app.biz.blackberry.com

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Re: An Open Letter To Customers

#71

Post by contextual »

qwerta wrote: post #21
gaius wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can run Android apps on BB10. But there would be no point in running Android, it would be a big step backwards security wise. Not to mention that Google don't do Android out of the goodness of their hearts. They want to make phone handsets commoditized with all the cool stuff in the software and in their "cloud". That's not a market you want to be in as a manufacturer - just ask IBM who were driven out of PCs, a…

I read that Android support in BB10 is not so great. Most of Android components are open sourced. There are versions of Android which strips out Google stuff. For example Facebook released their phone which runs on Android. There is even alternative OS (sailfish) with similar architecture, which runs Android apps just fine. The problem is that BlackBerry tries to be manufacturer. They do everything by themselves. Ins…

Data point: I sideload Android apps onto my BB Z30 all the time, and it's less than five minutes from start to finish. I feel like I have the best of both worlds.

Re: An Open Letter To Customers

#72

Post by contextual »

lostlogin wrote: post #32
robg wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a multi-billion dollar niche.

They are losing money hand over fist. http://www.cnbc.com/id/101065804

That's a September article, and a little context is in order. The writedown was in inventory and not cash. It was for product that had only been in the retail channel for a few months. Good product like the Z10. It was a strategic move to lower the price of the corporation so it could be taken private.

They were trying to make BlackBerry as affordable as they could, as quickly as they could.

Re: An Open Letter To Customers

#73

Post by moron4hire »

xsmasher wrote: post #56
cmsimike wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any further information on Iomega's downfall? I used them for their Zipdisks and would love to see read happened. I'm also interested in the downfall of Palm.

Zipdisks were overtaken by CD-R tech, which started out expensive ($2000+ writers, but with $100 readers in most machines) but quickly became too cheap for zip to compete (almost every CD-ROM drive was also a writer by the time DVD took over.)

Actually, I would expect the more likely killer to be USB thumb drives. No need to invest money or space in a drive at all, so they were usable even on your friend's or your university's or your employer's computers. The disc-based systems were woefully fragmented with a lot of confusion over R version RW and + versus - and CD versus DVD. It was more convenient to rewrite data than CDRW (how often do you need to permanently store data? Rewriting is the better use case). And the media was small enough that you thought nothing of taking it everywhere with you (like your keys and wallet). Plus, I would wager that USB thumb drives are more reliable than CDs, given the propensity for cheap CDs to delaminate or get scratched up versus the numerous thumb drives sent through the washing machine in pants pockets and still came out working.

Re: An Open Letter To Customers

#74

Post by kosei »

cones688 wrote: post #60
kosei wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for breaking that down. I can't believe that press release had so many acronyms without explanation. Do they expect all customers and potential customers to be able to understand all of that jargon?

By customers, this is targeted at CISOs (Cheif Information Security Officers) and other senior IT decision makers and Sysadmins. Without being too patronising, this is really really basic jargon for anyone working in the Enterprise IT mobile space - like someone knowing what HTML/CSS/JS stand for/represent in the web dev/design space.

Ah, I appreciate that. When I saw customers I thought it was referring to actual consumers (as a former Blackberry owner, myself).

Re: An Open Letter To Customers

#75

Post by dallagi »

mdm_ wrote: post #67
dallagi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree with you. I recently switched from android 4 to blackberry 10 and I couldn't be happier with it. It's an awesome OS, plus the app gap with android/ios is not really terrible (I can find almost all the apps I need in the BB world, and I have the android runtime -which works fine for me- for the others). I guess the majority of bb detractors have never played with BB10 for more than 10 minutes before. I…

My wife and I are currently trying to decide between the Q10 and the HTC One (we're both renewing contracts and upgrading from Samsung Galaxy Infuse). We're really drawn to the Q10 for the physical keyboard and BB10 looks awesome (we've watched video reviews and played around with a demo model in-store). There's also a little bit of a "Buy Canadian" thing, at least on my part. But we're leaning more and more towards…

In my opinion BlackBerry is just too big and important to fail. It's the only non-american major player, and it's well known for its security and reliability.

Anyway, if you're trying to decide between the Q10 and the HTC One, I think the biggest difference is the keyboard. If you prefer a physical one, just go BB. If you prefer a larger screen to watch pictures, videos and play games, buy the HTC One.

FIY some days ago Nokia gave me a free lumia for development purpose, and while typing on its screen keyboard I really missed the physical one of my Q10. With my BB I can type precisely without watching the keyboard, and I love it, while on touchscreen I feel insecure. Sometimes I'd like to have a bigger screen, but I wouldn't trade the keyboard for that (If you want to watch a movie, tablet are a better choice anyway).

Speaking about apps, as I already said I don't really feel such a huge gap. I have all the apps I usually use, and for the missing ones there is always the android runtime (which runs pretty well and is constantly improving). In addition to that, I feel a greater UI consistency in BB10 native application, compared to iOS and Android ones. You have settings on the top, main bar on the bottom, togglable action bar on the right and menu bar on the left. Imho this is a great value for BB, which is instead missing on Android.

Then, we could speak about swipe based ui, blackberry hub and a lot of things, but I think you already know all I could tell to you.

So, regardless of your final decision, I hope you will be satisfied with your new smartphone. Good luck!

(and sorry for my poor english)

Re: An Open Letter To Customers

#76

Post by itsameta4 »

moron4hire wrote: post #73
xsmasher wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zipdisks were overtaken by CD-R tech, which started out expensive ($2000+ writers, but with $100 readers in most machines) but quickly became too cheap for zip to compete (almost every CD-ROM drive was also a writer by the time DVD took over.)

Actually, I would expect the more likely killer to be USB thumb drives. No need to invest money or space in a drive at all, so they were usable even on your friend's or your university's or your employer's computers. The disc-based systems were woefully fragmented with a lot of confusion over R version RW and + versus - and CD versus DVD. It was more convenient to rewrite data than CDRW (how often do you need to perm…

True, but USB sticks didn't become very popular until well after Iomega had stopped being relevant.

Re: An Open Letter To Customers

#77

Post by jimbosis »

cmsimike wrote: post #37
astrodust wrote: post #3

It won't be long until you say Blackberry phone and people will say "What?" This company will be a case study in how deep in the sand you can stick your head. You'd think they'd have studied the spectacular downfall of Palm, and prior to that, Iomega, when trying to chart their own course.

Any further information on Iomega's downfall? I used them for their Zipdisks and would love to see read happened. I'm also interested in the downfall of Palm.

The effusive Thom Holwerda of OSNews wrote up a quite long telling (55 pg in the PDF version) of the Palm story not too long ago.

http://www.osnews.com/story/26838/Palm_I_m_ready_to_wallow_n...

Note that you can read the whole thing on the website. The TOC is after his plug for purchasing the PDF.

And someone in the know commented that some of the Android developers are people from the Palm world.

http://www.osnews.com/story/26861/Additional_insights_into_P...

Re: An Open Letter To Customers

#78

Post by astrodust »

moron4hire wrote: post #31
astrodust wrote: post #3

It won't be long until you say Blackberry phone and people will say "What?" This company will be a case study in how deep in the sand you can stick your head. You'd think they'd have studied the spectacular downfall of Palm, and prior to that, Iomega, when trying to chart their own course.

It's corporate schizophrenia. So few corporations avoid it. The only ones I can think of in technology are IBM and Motorola. They seem to have been able to reinvent themselves enough times to avoid crapping out entirely. Sure, they aren't the biggest in their fields, but maybe that all consuming pursuit to be the biggest is part of the downfall of other companies.

Motorola actually died, it just limped along in the mobile space until that part was acquired by Google.

Motorola off-loaded their CPU manufacturing, that's now Freescale Semiconductor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freescale_Semiconductor), and ditched their PC business. They're still losing money in mobile so it's likely they would've cratered before long.

Re: An Open Letter To Customers

#79

Post by astrodust »

cmsimike wrote: post #37
astrodust wrote: post #3

It won't be long until you say Blackberry phone and people will say "What?" This company will be a case study in how deep in the sand you can stick your head. You'd think they'd have studied the spectacular downfall of Palm, and prior to that, Iomega, when trying to chart their own course.

Any further information on Iomega's downfall? I used them for their Zipdisks and would love to see read happened. I'm also interested in the downfall of Palm.

Iomega completely disrupted the removable bulk storage market held by SyQuest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syquest), rendering their rival virtually irrelevant within a few years.

That massive success and complete market domination led to a sense of complacency, and when CD-R and CD-R+W emerged, with 650MB of storage on very inexpensive non-proprietary media, Iomega was slow to react.

The first CD-R burners were VCR-sized devices that required a lot of expertise to operate. They cost $15,000 and ran single-speed burning on to media that cost $15-20 a piece.

This quickly changed, and within a few years the price of media had plunged below a dollar a unit, and 4x and 8x burners were available for a few hundred bucks.

Long after CD-R had displaced Zip disks, Iomega produced a line of mediocre CD-R devices. They didn't succeed, as an internal burner could be purchased for as little as $25 and Iomega's external version was around $300 so as not to cannibalize sales of their flagship Jaz drive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iomega_Jaz), a product that ultimately went nowhere and had near zero adoption.

The other thing that hit at about the same time was the internet. With only dial-up speeds people were forced to use removable media to transfer large files, and Iomega offered a cost-effective solution for that problem at the time. As soon as speeds increased and people could send large amounts of data without having to "sneaker-net" it over, the need for these things was largely eliminated.

Re: An Open Letter To Customers

#80

Post by Zenst »

jlgaddis wrote: post #59
Zenst wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but in a far smaller font than the headline "An Open Letter to Customers", which is technicaly the first line of this statment. But hardly good when such confusion is evident, heck BIS was enterprise and BES was consumer, see why people confused with such magical boundaries of consumer.

>* ... heck BIS was enterprise and BES was consumer ... You've got that flipped around.

Your right - my bad.
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