Saying goodbye to my Blackberry …

It’s time to say goodbye to my Blackberry Z10.

It’s never let me down. It still works fine. But I have to move on. 

It’s the end of an era for me, nonetheless. 

My first smartphone was a Blackberry. The one after that was a Blackberry. And the one after that, too. Not a single one of those failed me. Ever.  They were all rock solid devices that did everything you asked flawlessly.  Until now I’ve always been faithful to the brand. 

However, Blackberry as a company failed to adapt to change quickly enough. And in the technology marketplace that can be deadly.  

Blackberry fell behind because it stubbornly protected what it considered its crown jewel – its proprietary Blackberry operating system (OS).  It’s a great OS by the way, robust and bullet-proof in almost every way, but that’s not enough to survive and grow – you need third-party apps people want.  App developers follow the crowd; if you don’t have the numbers, they won’t support you.  Because proprietary Blackberry devices couldn’t compete on price with high-volume mass-market smartphone makers, Blackberry couldn’t get the numbers. 

So as its market share got smaller and smaller, fewer and fewer developers were willing to devote the resources to make versions of their apps for Blackberry.  Once that downward trend starts, it’s virtually impossible to reverse. Blackberry most likely will never recover. 

The ultimate winners among technology companies don’t always make the best devices or most elegant operating systems. They just make stuff that sells enough to achieve critical mass – a certain ubiquity, as it were. With enough devices running their operating system more third-party software developers jump on board. With enough software available, more devices are sold.  With more devices sold, more software for those devices is created. And so on. 

It’s possible to accelerate this process.  Make a decent operating system available to just about any device manufacturer, keep the price to OEM manufacturers low and put enough marketing dollars behind it, then let the device manufacturers drive down their product prices – and their profit margins, not yours – as they compete against each other.    

It’s how Microsoft gained dominance for Windows in the desktop and laptop marketplace. It’s also why, to this day Apple – which won’t allow anyone else to make an Apple-compatible desktop or laptop – only has about 7% market share. (That’s also why hackers and virus writers attack Windows users almost exclusively; there simply aren’t that many Apple users.)

That’s not to say Apple doesn’t make a lot of money – it does – but most of its income and profits now come from purely consumer products and services, not desktops and laptops. Apple’s effectively abandoned the business market, except for graphic design, and most business-software developers focus on Windows-platform products first.  

Apple makes its money catering to those with fierce loyalty to the Apple brand. Apple can't compete on price, nor does it even bother. Apple can command a premium for their products because to some people Apple is not just a good brand, with nicely designed products, but a status brand. Apple fans wait breathlessly in line for hours to be among the first to buy the latest Apple offering whatever it is. And they are willing to pay a lot more for the Apple name.  

The same way, believe it or not, people once paid a premium for a Blackberry.    

A lot of people still think the real battle of corporate giants for operating system dominance is between Microsoft and Apple. It’s not.  In the general business user market, Microsoft rules; Apple’s not even close. In the consumer market – and especially for smartphones and tablets – it’s between Microsoft Windows and Google’s Android OS.  And Android is winning big.   

 

By offering a decent operating system free – which is what Google did with Android – to any and all possible smartphone and tablet makers, the result is predictable: price wars among manufacturers and a flood of ever cheaper devices as they fight for market share. That’s why there are a lot more Android-based smartphones and tablets on the market than Windows-based versions of these despite Microsoft’s best efforts. And, frankly, far more Android-based smartphones and tablets sold than iOS-based versions (like the iPhone and iPad) from Apple. 

But back to Blackberry.      

The reality for Blackberry is that the rest of the world has moved on to Android or iOS-based smartphones and tablets. Virtually every app written these days is for one or both of these operating systems. Blackberry users have essentially been left behind; practically nobody writing apps will spend the time creating apps for an ever-shrinking pool of potential users. Why bother?   

You can’t blame developers for walking away. The Android platform now has 82% of the market. As I said earlier, developers follow crowds. So do device manufacturers.   

Blackberry did at last come out with an Android-based phone but it’s woefully expensive and way too late. Why would anyone invest hundreds of dollars in an Android-based Blackberry when they can get a Samsung, LG or other Android smartphone – which will do everything the Blackberry does and more – for a fraction of that? Sometimes even free with a two-year wireless contract? 

In a way, it’s sad. But it was also predictable. 

I shed no tears putting my last Blackberry aside. I like my new Samsung smartphone. It does everything my Blackberry did: e-mail, contacts, calendar, etc. For a lot less.  

It also syncs automatically with my Google account so my contacts and calendar on Google are instantly updated on every Android device I own whenever I make a change.  I couldn’t do that with my Blackberry without connecting it to my PC or laptop and running another program.

But the biggest advantage the new device has is that it’s not a closed system like Blackberry. This means there are thousands of apps for it, and more always being developed because the Android platform has the numbers to make it worthwhile for developers.  It’s got critical mass.

Something Blackberry couldn’t achieve.  

Over the years Blackberry got more than a thousand dollars from me for all the successive Blackberry devices I bought. But I suspect they won’t get any more.

I have to follow the crowd, too. It's nothing personal.