Blackberry 10 launch could be the beginning of a long road back
Think of it: six months ago the New York Times ran a story saying that BlackBerry owners were ashamed of their devices.
Six months ago, Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer said she was changing company policy and buying employees Apple and Android devices. No more clunky BlackBerrys. It was going to be peace and love in the office.
Six months ago, the numbers seemed to confirm Research in Motion’s rapid fall. In just three years, their global smartphone market share plunged to six per cent from a peak of 20 per cent; share prices collapsed 80 per cent in the same period. In the U.S., Apple’s iPhone now owns 51 per cent of the market and Android, 44 per cent.
So the bears on Wall Street feasted on RIM for three years and are now rubbing their hands with glee. Why? Because they bought RIM at the bottom, and now RIM is back.
The thing is, smartphone growth has exploded while RIM has been standing still. The company still has a healthy 80 million users worldwide, and more than 500,00 in the U.S. government alone.
Why has RIM persisted? Because for those in the know, BlackBerrys are essential.
BlackBerry’s secret sauce is security. Every time you send a BlackBerry message it is compressed and encrypted, then decrypted when it gets to your device. B-to-B messaging is pretty much secure.
With Apple or Android devices, you are messaging in what is called “clear text” — and you are asking for trouble. New hacker exploits like “spear phishing,” “man in the middle” and other forms of data attack are spreading fast. Any business or government organization not using BlackBerry to run its corporate messaging is taking a huge risk.
I am currently writing a book on computer hacking, and believe me, it’s a dangerous world out there, and getting worse. Today’s criminal hackers are feasting on companies and individuals, and the antivirus companies have pretty much given up on controlling this plague. For $700 you can even buy cracking software for Yahoo mail on the Web.
RIM has survived primarily because it has never lost sight of the fact that security is No. 1.
After several years of over promising and under delivering, RIM finally got it right with its BlackBerry 10 superphone, launched on Wednesday.
And they did it by under promising and over delivering.
RIM — now rebranded as simply BlackBerry Inc. — has taken a major leaf out of the Apple playbook. They now have an easy to grasp product suite — the Z10 touchscreen phone, a new Keyboard Q10 BlackBerry, and the Playbook Tablet. No more BlackBerry 8700, 8900x, etc. etc. ❚ BlackBerry Balance keeps the security focus intact — users can cordon off workplace and personal data from each other on BlackBerry 10s and PlayBook tablets. ❚ BlackBerry World For Work is a compelling ecosystem for BlackBerry “Workplace Apps” — with built in messenger, video mail, and slide show maker. Android apps can also be wrapped and ported over to the BlackBerry platform. ❚ A refreshed BlackBerry Enterprise Server 10 can now manage Apple and Android devices from the BES environment; so, peace and love in the office. ❚ BlackBerry OS 10 software, developed by Ottawa’s QNX software group, is great. I particularly like BlackBerry Flow: you can swipe between apps, the web and messaging. This beats Apple, where you have to push a big physical button to get back to the home page, which BB calls “the Hub.”
So how did BlackBerry get back from the brink? QNX and CEO Thorsten Heins should take a lot of credit for the turnaround.
Five years ago, the world shifted while Research in Motion was wallowing in its own hubris, starting to believe its own press clippings. Then co-CEO Jim Balsillie bizarrely mused to a journalist that RIM was like Venice in the 15th century — a portal for the whole world. RIM’s corporate PR went along for the ride, engineering “cult of BlackBerry” gatherings in the Rogers Centre with U2. RIM could do no wrong.
Then in 2007, Steve Jobs pulled the iPhone out of his hat, and suddenly RIM was faced by a major problem. How do you compete with the goodness that is Apple?
RIM didn’t. They got the stupid disease when telecom companies like AT&T went Apple mad. They came out with a whole string of clunky devices, like the Storm, where the whole screen was one big button. After ignoring developers for years, they rolled out their own Apple wannabe app store. It was a pain to use. They started over-promising the next big thing, then seriously under-delivering. When they tried to upgrade their servers, they inflicted their users with service outages. It was getting ugly.
Panicky pension funds ditched the stock, which plunged from the $170s to a nadir of $6 last year. People worried, was RIM going to be another riches to rags story, another Corel or Nortel?
What we saw at the Wednesday launch was a whole new brand with a great attitude. Heins’ decision to keep RIM’s own OS and go with QNX was very gutsy. He could have taken the easy way out; BlackBerry could have become an Android clone, and sunk into obscurity.
Employees are getting the message. Now, instead of cult love-ins in the Rogers Centre, Heins has approved family skating parties to celebrate the launch. Free hot chocolate and doughnuts all around.
You could say RIM is back, and Canada’s tech sector can breathe a sign of relief. Well not exactly.
Heins and his teams have a lot of hard work ahead, getting BlackBerrys into the hands of every provider on the planet, and drilling their way back into the universe of cool — we’ll see how well this is working during Sunday’s Super Bowl, where BlackBerry is paying $100,000 a second for commercials.
As a manager, Heins still has to work with a company that is bloated and overstaffed and probably still needs trimming down. There are still section heads in the firm who for years got away with playing favourites and actively alienating major hunks of the developer community.
He’s giving up $500 million a year in revenue by going independent like Apple; he’ll have to make this up from sales, maybe slashing more personnel, maybe using innovative sales outlets, such as kiosks in airports.
The smartphone revolution has just begun, and there’s still a lot of good will on BlackBerry’s side. With Android clutter, Apple fatigue and criminal hackers robbing decent people on the Web, there’s a very good chance that BlackBerry’s solution can stand out and thrive.