The Berry Crack’d

Welp. Blackberry is officially looking for somebody to buy them. This was more or less inevitable; the Z10 was far too little three years too late while the Playbook was a complete and utter bust as a tablet (Amazon basically schooled them with extraordinarily similar hardware with the original $199 Kindle Fire).  Sic transit gloria mundi – the gold standard of the connected life in 2002 is a poor fourth in 2013, and arguably has been since Microsoft shipped Windows Phone 7.

It didn’t have to be like this.  Research In Motion had a hammerlock on the corporate market for most of the first decade of the 21st century.  For the longest time, the Blackberry Enterprise Server was the only option if you wanted to get your corporate email sent to a portable device, and it remained the most secure and reliable choice even as the Sidekick and iPhone carved out the “consumer smartphone” market for themselves – because Blackberry Messenger split the difference between texting and IM and became the indispensable unique selling point for RIM’s devices.  Apple didn’t produce an alternative until Messages in 2011.

But what did for Blackberry, ultimately, was Android – which gave half a dozen different companies the opportunity to put a “good enough” smartphone in the hands of any old punter, free with a two year contract. And Android (and with it the iPhone) got a lot better at accommodating corporate requirements before the Blackberry got the ability to handle consumer smartphone apps and connectivity. I experienced it myself in 2009, when I carried the Bold for a couple of months.  The most well-received and highly-regarded Blackberry device to date, and it still sported a physical keyboard and a tiny (albeit crystal-clear) screen.  And the most highly-recommended application for web browsing was the same Opera proxy browser that I’d been trying to use on a Moto flip phone four years earlier.

RIM thought everyone would stay loyal to the physical keyboard – but of all the high-end smartphones of the last couple of years, exactly none have shipped with a keyboard.  Not the HTC One, not the Samsung Galaxy S3 or S4, not the Moto X, not any iPhone.  Even RIM/Blackberry shipped the Z10, with no keyboard, a month before the Q10 which had it.  RIM also thought people would stay loyal to Blackberry Enterprise Server – but the iPhone has had direct interoperability with Exchange servers for five years, which beats having to run a separate box for wireless email.  And the proliferation of unlimited texting – and ultimately unlimited messaging of all types – made Blackberry Messenger just one more number to remember.

It didn’t have to be like this.  RIM could have, should have jumped onto Android as soon as it became obvious the iPhone wasn’t a gimmick or a fad or a one-off.  Instead of the Storm – with its full screen that clicked as one huge button – RIM should have turned out an Android phone.  Instead of layering it with the likes of Sense or MOTOBLUR or TouchWiz, they should have taken the opportunity to port BBM, to layer their BES interoperability and security over Android.  They could have taken the best, most attractive, most marketable parts of the Blackberry experience, let Google be responsible for the OS and the ecosystem, and established a value proposition that no Android vendor could have rivaled.  Instead, they remained convinced they were indispensable.

Nobody’s indispensable. “Good enough” always carries the day, else the Macintosh would have ruled personal computing in the 1990s.  And “good enough” has carried Android to the market lead, as the Moto X builds buzz and as one blogger after another proclaims the miracle of Google Now.  One in particular said that Android has surpassed the iPhone experience for him because he uses Google services for everything anyway – which makes perfect sense. If you use Google services for everything, well of course a Google phone OS that integrates with your existing Google accounts and services will work better than an iPhone, or a Blackberry, or a Windows Phone device.

But that’s the thing, as I learned when trying to make it work: Google Now is of very limited utility if you don’t use GMail as your email provider.  I can get the directions to work every morning, I can get the weather (kinda sorta), but I don’t use GMail at all anymore – so I’m not going to have automated package tracking or flight status updates or boarding passes magically appearing at the airport or hotel and restaurant reservation reminders.  Once somebody comes up with a mechanism that can mine the data on the local device and parse it there, without recourse to reading your data from the server side or piping it back up to the cloud first, this might work out a lot better for me.

But for now, I don’t need it that badly. Weather and traffic alone aren’t that vital, they appear to be coming to the iOS 7 notifications automatically anyway, and there’s nothing I can’t get just as effectively elsewhere.  Which could be the ultimate epitaph for Blackberry: in the end, everything else got to be just as good.

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