RIP - Blackberry

[Edward64]

Although not technically dead, it has lost its market dominance and probably won't recover. I think they are in a downward spiral to irrelevance, bankruptcy or breakup.

Its been only 4-5 years ago when crackberry phrase was in vogue?

From CrackBerry to 'depressing': The BlackBerry's 5-year fall - CNN.com

"Anyone who's been paying attention isn't surprised by BlackBerry maker Research In Motion's recent collapse," a blogger for ReadWriteWeb wrote. "It's unfortunate, but it's been inevitable."

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion announced Thursday it is laying off 5,000 people -- and said earnings for the past three months were significantly less than expected, with the company reporting a first-quarter loss of $518 million. Sales were down 40% from last year. Furthermore, the new operating system it's pinning its hopes on will be delayed until next year, or, a full year after it was originally expected.

Couple all of that with more reports that the company might be looking to sell off its once dominant service, and you had what amounted to a devastating head-kick for the Canadian company. It capped off a gut-punch of a financial year that has seen RIM's stock price drop 70%.

So, what happened? As an even more gadget-obsessed society than we were five years ago, how did we stop being BlackBerry fiends.

Well, how's this for cruel and cosmic irony? A day after the dismal report, something called the iPhone celebrated its fifth birthday.

Early in my professional career, I remember asking myself how some big companies could become secondary players, lose their competitive edge considering their (one time) dominant position and all the resources they had.

Plenty of examples now to reflect on. Disruptor technology, taking too much risk, fudging financials etc.

[cartman]

Yep. Our company has not done any new development on BBs in a couple of years. Really only one of our customers still has any decent amount of them deployed, and they just announced they are moving to Android phones. Four years ago they had 5,000+ BlackBerry devices deployed. All of the stuff we've been doing lately has been Android/iOS.

[RainMaker]

It is pretty crazy how far they've fallen. I remember when everyone had a Blackberry at work. I was actually still a user of it up till about 6 months ago. Just love typing on those things. Unfortunately nothing else the company did could keep up with the times.

[stevew]

I'll miss the days of having to pull my battery for a hard reset.

[lynchjm24]

Timely. They have been a walking corpse for a while.

[Ryan S]

I have been using a Blackberry for about 7 years for work, and I have found the phones to be amongst the most unreliable electronic devices I have ever had the misfortune to use.

[Desnudo]

I'm actually bucking the trend as I recently had to get a bb bold for work. I had an android device that was still on contract, but not supported. So the choice was bb or buy a full price non-4g iPhone.

I definitely like the form factor, phone / speaker volume, keyboard, and camera. The speaker is substantially louder than my droid, on which I often have trouble hearing conversations even at max volume.

The software UI reminds me of windows 6.5 though. I feel like there is a market for this kind of product, but their management just doesn't get it. Ultimately they should just start marketing this as a texting / social tool to teens.

[jeff061]

When I was doing a lot of mail server work back in 2006, I was predicting and hoping for their death. As much as people loved to tout their business user prowess, they were a finicky pain in the ass to just keep/get working and manage. Even Windows mobile 5 was far easier. Had more "My BES is down again" calls than anything.

Their back end was dated back then. Was not surprised when the front end eventually followed suit and they circled the drain.

[jeff061]

And with BYOD now and gazillions of ways to manage them to mitigate the risk that used to make it a dirty word....well....fuck BES.

[Logan]

Blackberry would still be the dominant phone manufacturer if the technology stopped where you could only place calls, send texts, and email.

And Brickbreaker.

[Honolulu_Blue]

I had a Blackberry for a good 6 years or so for work. A little over a year ago, I switched to an iPhone and would never go back. It's like night and day. I can fully understand why Blackberry is struggling.

[spleen1015]

Originally Posted by Honolulu_Blue

I had a Blackberry for a good 6 years or so for work. A little over a year ago, I switched to an iPhone and would never go back. It's like night and day. I can fully understand why Blackberry is struggling.

Same for me.

We still have people at work who use BB.

[QuikSand]

Rarely has there been an industry where, at least to me as a user, the winners and losers were so penetratingly clear.

I was really thrilled to get my first smartphone, a Palm Treo. It was great.

Then I got my blackberry, and it was hipper and better in most ways. Definitely the industry leader, and it was completely clear that Palm was just done for.

Now, blackberry simply refuses to keep up with the cutting edge of smartphones, and has been there for at least 18-24 months. Walking corpse indeed- they are clearly only in business at all due to inertia.

iPhone is the market leader, there are numerous other devices that make legitimate entries to try to occupy the not-quite-as-pricey or not-quite-as-hip space, but that's clearly where the action is. Blackberry is dead in the water.

[MizzouRah]

My work is still making us use BB's, I have had mine for about 9 years now I think. They are very durable, that much I can say.

[Marc Vaughan]

Originally Posted by QuikSand

iPhone is the market leader, there are numerous other devices that make legitimate entries to try to occupy the not-quite-as-pricey or not-quite-as-hip space, but that's clearly where the action is. Blackberry is dead in the water.

Actually as a 'whole' the iPhone lost the market lead position a while back to Android - although its defending its (very large) share quite well ....

Windows Mobile is the dark horse in the race, its word of mouth is spreading and it has some good devices ...... now its down to whether they can actually get publisher support, some decent marketing behind it and push it and Windows8 simultaneously.

[jeff061]

I'd expect any success of the Windows 8 phone will hinge on the success of the Windows 8 tablet.

[stevew]

Ideally there would be less simultaneous flavors of Android running. For example, 4.1(I think the code names are dumb) comes out on the Nexus 7, very few phones have upgraded to version 4, tablets are on version 3 and the majority of the handsets are on 2.3. I'm leaning towards an unlocked Galaxy Nexus in a month or two, assuming it isn't banned for good.

I really like the looks of Win7.5 and the Lumina 900 or Titan2. But not when Win8 won't be supported. Basically I am stuck waiting on Win8 and the new iPhone to come out in order to make a decision on what I'm getting. That's kind of frustrating.

[ISiddiqui]

Originally Posted by stevew

Ideally there would be less simultaneous flavors of Android running. For example, 4.1(I think the code names are dumb) comes out on the Nexus 7, very few phones have upgraded to version 4, tablets are on version 3 and the majority of the handsets are on 2.3. I'm leaning towards an unlocked Galaxy Nexus in a month or two, assuming it isn't banned for good.

While "fragmentation" gets panned all the time, it is the main reason why you can get an Android in any design or configuration you want. The issue is that it may take your carrier a while to officially support the next version, but if you want it bad enough, you can root your phone (and then the carrier is off the hook for if the next OS is just too much for your phone.

[jeff061]

I don't mind the fragmentation so much. There are the pure Google versions available if you want an Apple like experience.

[Subby]

Just decommissioned our BB server a few months ago. We were pure BB for 10 years but even the hardest core BB users were sick of being unable to do anything besides text and email.

My kid lost his phone recently and I made him use one of our old BBs as punishment. He's miserable.

[RainMaker]

I'm sort of wondering if Apple either needs to speed up development cycles or offer another phone option (maybe just a 6 month refresh like you see with laptops). One of the things I've noticed is that Apple can get really far behind spec wise. Just look at the difference in the new Android phones hitting the market and the Apple iPhone. And Apple is probably 6 months away from the release of a new phone.

In the past they were so far ahead that it didn't matter, but now they are starting to feel like the company falling behind.

[jeff061]

That's been their MO since at least the iMac. If anything there is a smaller delta now. Seems to work out for them.

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by jeff061

And with BYOD now and gazillions of ways to manage them to mitigate the risk that used to make it a dirty word....well....fuck BES.

I think people are just more comfortable with less security, as a rule. There seems to be a lot more emphasis now on managing crises than actually risk avoidance. It's like the security world has done a collective "eff it" and the job has shifted from risk mitigation to disaster recovery.

I just don't see the robust options to manage/mitigate security risk. It seems like everywhere has at least 1 up to 3 of the following solutions for Mobility BYOD:
1) Security policy that forces locked phones
2) Encrypt all devices (only if business provided, tho)
3) Some sort of remote phone wipe
And then they call it a day, like that solves the problem. Never mind locations where they use iTunes to sync data or how you can transfer files to and from devices unencumbered or how, hell, everyone just turns a blind eye to people using their personal devices for everything

Laptops and desktops have a bit more robust security and control because they're almost always provided by the company/institution but even then most places manage using three tools, each of which have some flaws:
1) GPOs
2) Encrypt all machines
3) VPN access for remote internet

I'm curious what additional steps do you see in place in most locations. I'm not doubting better is out there but I've been at some pretty large companies and have helped implement and support very similar solutions and very disparate customers.

SI

[jeff061]

For phones, there's just not much of a difference between corporate supplied phones and BYOD. Even corporate provided mobiles rarely use more than your first list. On the horizon is virtual operating systems on the mobile itself to split the phone between corporate and home, this will likely spread quickly the second Apple supports it. Hopefully they do. The hardware is already capable of this, most new phones come with dual core processors.

For laptops and tablets, it's VDI. And BYOD will be(is) invading this space as well. The local OS doesn't even need to interact with the corporate network. Desktop virtualization has been a hot topic for years now, but I'm really only seeing interest pick up on a wider scale very recently. Previously I had to go in and sell it, now people are coming to me to do proof of concept engagements.

[sterlingice]

I was just having a conversation a couple of hours ago about VDI. I'm just not seeing the practicality but maybe I haven't seen a good model of it yet. I've certainly been in my share of environments with both ESX and Citrix. And they can be used to great effectiveness and benefit in the enterprise environment.

For ESX, I like and understand the concept of shrinking your data center down by using a Blade enclosure for redundancy (tho the backplane is still a single point of fail) and virtualizing it to get rid of your domain controller, iis servers, print servers, etc (tho only lightweight SQL boxes- those are best left to beefier items).

For Citrix, I see virtualizing a single application or application sets for access control all over the place and it makes sense.

But what need is filled in the desktop space by virtualizing clients? We're basically back to the 80s and terminals again. Rather than doing it because hardware is expensive (a cheap laptop costs what a thin client costs nowadays), it's for "control" and "security" but I don't see the actual gains.

SI

[jeff061]

Provide access to a dedicated desktop from anywhere for every single employee, with almost a native user experience(thank you PCoIP/ICA). Gives company total control of over end user data(never leaves data center). Quicker provisioning/re-provisioning. Hardware refreshes are cheaper and easier. Far less man hours are needed to maintain a VDI environment compared to a sprawled physical ones.You can throw upwards of 50 desktops on a single ESX host depending on your config, so even backend hardware is not a huge cost. Those are the obvious reasons that apply to almost everyone.

The only reason you don't do it is licensing cost, non-Windows guest OS(no all-in-one solution there yet) or if you are running something like Autocad. License cost is too high now, it will come down.

As for ESX, you're selling it short if you think you can't run mission critical high perfomance applications on it. Really the last version that saw some performance issues was 3.5. I've run multi-terabyte Oracle databases and 10k user Exchange servers off an ESXi backend. Anyways, ESXi is old news, everyone has that. Now you have vCloud Director that allows end users to provision multi server application sets on their own from a self serve portal. I'm actually working a Linux VDI using vCloud Director deal now. It's about the management tools now that sit ontop of a virtualized infrastructure. Hell even Citrix gave up on XenServer and wants you to buy their management tools that sit ontop of ESXi.

On the topic of blades, look what you can do with stateless computing with UCS or FlexFabric. Blades aren't just about power and space conservation anymore.

Anyways going off topic . But this is what I do.

[Daimyo]

Originally Posted by RainMaker

One of the things I've noticed is that Apple can get really far behind spec wise. Just look at the difference in the new Android phones hitting the market and the Apple iPhone. And Apple is probably 6 months away from the release of a new phone.

Why do you care about the specs of your smartphone?

[Ryan S]

Originally Posted by Daimyo

Why do you care about the specs of your smartphone?

Screen size is one of the specs where Apple is a mile behind everyone else.

[ISiddiqui]

Originally Posted by Daimyo

Why do you care about the specs of your smartphone?

Why do you care about the specs of your laptop? You can do more with smartphones that have better specs, especially if you are multitasking.

[stevew]

I feel like more RAM would help out the iPhone. It's also bad when you're tethered to a phone for 2 years via contract.

It seems like we are only a few years away from a phone being a capable latop replacement. Something like the Asus Padfone could become a new standard in a few generations.

[ISiddiqui]

Heck you can already play Grand Theft Auto III on your mobile device.

[JediKooter]

Originally Posted by stevew

It's also bad when you're tethered to a phone for 2 years via contract.

You can now get an iPhone without a contract or very very soon you will be able to.

[Edward64]

With which carriers?

[JediKooter]

Looks at&t only at this time.


There's this article from Time: Apple Now Selling No-Contract iPhone 4S Starting at $649 | Techland | TIME.com (I don't seem to remember it being through at&t though)

And this article: Apple's Selling Unlocked No-Contract iPhone 4S Now

And here: iPhoneÂ*4S - Buy iPhone 4S UnlockedÂ*or for AT&T, Verizon orÂ*Sprint - Apple Store (U.S.) there's a link for buying a no contract iPhone under the 'Choose a network carrier'.

Unless I read something wrong, everything appears to be with no contract.

[stevew]

Yeah, if you want 2 year old technology for $500/650 and don't mind it being on Virgin Mobile. It is a good deal if you can live with sprint, but I can't.

$650 for an unlocked iPhone 4S is way too much....it basically makes it the most expensive unlocked phone around. Spec wise especially.

[cartman]

Our company does encryption as our core business (just recently had a patent issued). A couple of our health care customers mandate that any PHI on a phone has to go through one of our apps. They have already fired a couple of folks who didn't take it seriously and left patient data unsecured.

Much like any other security initiative, unless there is buy-in and accountability from the execs, it usually goes nowhere.

[Galaril]

Originally Posted by jeff061

Provide access to a dedicated desktop from anywhere for every single employee, with almost a native user experience(thank you PCoIP/ICA). Gives company total control of over end user data(never leaves data center). Quicker provisioning/re-provisioning. Hardware refreshes are cheaper and easier. Far less man hours are needed to maintain a VDI environment compared to a sprawled physical ones.You can throw upwards of 50 desktops on a single ESX host depending on your config, so even backend hardware is not a huge cost. Those are the obvious reasons that apply to almost everyone.

The only reason you don't do it is licensing cost, non-Windows guest OS(no all-in-one solution there yet) or if you are running something like Autocad. License cost is too high now, it will come down.

As for ESX, you're selling it short if you think you can't run mission critical high perfomance applications on it. Really the last version that saw some performance issues was 3.5. I've run multi-terabyte Oracle databases and 10k user Exchange servers off an ESXi backend. Anyways, ESXi is old news, everyone has that. Now you have vCloud Director that allows end users to provision multi server application sets on their own from a self serve portal. I'm actually working a Linux VDI using vCloud Director deal now. It's about the management tools now that sit ontop of a virtualized infrastructure. Hell even Citrix gave up on XenServer and wants you to buy their management tools that sit ontop of ESXi.

On the topic of blades, look what you can do with stateless computing with UCS or FlexFabric. Blades aren't just about power and space conservation anymore.

Anyways going off topic . But this is what I do.

Jeff,

This is an interesting discussion. I in my role at my organization have been mulling moving all our end users to VDI as we look at deploying Win 7 to our 500 locations around the US. It has a ton of benefits and for us the big hurtle is all the traffic that would come back through our Data center to access the Citrix environment. We have not go so far to move to VOIP and in fact have only about 40% of our locations on MPLS with most still using standard VPN client side architecture to access corp resources (servers). I agree VDI is definitely the way of the future especially with BYOD and some of the features coming with Windows 8 and beyond.

[Hoya1]

I'm still a proud blackberry user/supporter. I've had one for a number of years and just recently purchased the new bold. I will go down with the ship I suppose.
I can't get away from the buttons or my bbm. I guess I'm one of the people that doesn't play games on their phone either.

[Galaril]

Originally Posted by Hoya1

I'm still a proud blackberry user/supporter. I've had one for a number of years and just recently purchased the new bold. I will go down with the ship I suppose.
I can't get away from the buttons or my bbm. I guess I'm one of the people that doesn't play games on their phone either.

Yeah I there with you I loved my Blackberry and even moved to the new one that had the touch screen which I liked. That being said after my boss our CIO made me pilot a new 4s iphone I can see why people like them too. They do require some new thinking but to be honest even as a "security guy" by education and trade for most of my career the security "issues" many mention are pretty minimal if an overall mobile device management policy and solution is implemented. Apple got the damn IOS so locked down it is hard for malware to really get a foot hold though not impossible it seems. Androids are another story

[Desnudo]

Originally Posted by Hoya1

I'm still a proud blackberry user/supporter. I've had one for a number of years and just recently purchased the new bold. I will go down with the ship I suppose.
I can't get away from the buttons or my bbm. I guess I'm one of the people that doesn't play games on their phone either.

The BB won't go away. It will eventually get bought by MSFT or a telco for the brand and patents. There will be a market for physical keyboards for the foreseeable future. It just won't be a monopoly on corporate IT departments.

Moving away from corporate IT would actually improve the product for the individual user if someone wanted to invest the R&D.

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by jeff061

Provide access to a dedicated desktop from anywhere for every single employee, with almost a native user experience(thank you PCoIP/ICA). Gives company total control of over end user data(never leaves data center). Quicker provisioning/re-provisioning. Hardware refreshes are cheaper and easier. Far less man hours are needed to maintain a VDI environment compared to a sprawled physical ones.You can throw upwards of 50 desktops on a single ESX host depending on your config, so even backend hardware is not a huge cost. Those are the obvious reasons that apply to almost everyone.

The only reason you don't do it is licensing cost, non-Windows guest OS(no all-in-one solution there yet) or if you are running something like Autocad. License cost is too high now, it will come down.

As for ESX, you're selling it short if you think you can't run mission critical high perfomance applications on it. Really the last version that saw some performance issues was 3.5. I've run multi-terabyte Oracle databases and 10k user Exchange servers off an ESXi backend. Anyways, ESXi is old news, everyone has that. Now you have vCloud Director that allows end users to provision multi server application sets on their own from a self serve portal. I'm actually working a Linux VDI using vCloud Director deal now. It's about the management tools now that sit ontop of a virtualized infrastructure. Hell even Citrix gave up on XenServer and wants you to buy their management tools that sit ontop of ESXi.

On the topic of blades, look what you can do with stateless computing with UCS or FlexFabric. Blades aren't just about power and space conservation anymore.

Anyways going off topic . But this is what I do.

I've been out of the server space for more than 2 years so I love going off topic with this and catching up on what I've missed. We were running VMWare 3.0 and 3.5 so, yeah, it was an issue then

I'm curious technologically how you can get nearly the same level of performance from a VM as from a dedicated server. Fundamentally you put a new layer of emulation between the software and a hardware and, by their very nature, databases run much quicker when closer to the hardware. Virtualizing the box helps distribute CPU and memory allocation much better but that's not where the bottleneck is for databases: it all lies with storage hits. So if you introduce another layer of mapping between storage and the database, it would greatly encumber overall performance much more than any other gains can give. But, again, maybe I just don't understand how it works technologically.

As for VDI, I'm still foggy on a viable environment. You still need hardware to run it on. We have a project going on at work and I'm struggling to see the benefit but would love to continue hashing it out mentally here so I understand. Feel free to continue poking holes in my knowledge because it just makes me that much better prepared for my job

First, let's take mobility out of the picture for a moment- you can't be running large applications off of phones yet. Too small of display, hardware not strong enough yet, etc.

Second, you can equip everyone with tablets and do things that way but, realistically, there's not much power difference between a $500 tablet and a $500 laptop, hardware-wise. There are some aesthetic preferences (tablet smaller and "cooler") and hardware preferences (laptop will still be beefier with cpu, mem, storage) but at their core, both are portable computers.

Lastly, you have "desktops". Again, like drawing parallels between tablets and laptops, I think you can do the same with desktops and thin clients. Both can be had in the ~$300 range. Like the previous case, bulk rates and hardware changes can make huge differences here but if you have a good buyer who understands the company's needs, you can go cheap if that's what you want for your users. At the end of the day, you still need a box that can computer, has some local storage (maybe), a network connection, display, and input devices.

So, both of the above are very similar to the environments you see out there now: tablet/thin client vs laptop/desktop. The hardware is different but the business model is the same. You have individuals out there with company provided machines attaching to a company network. I guess the difference is that on one, all the storage and processing is done locally while at the other, all of that is done on the server side. However, the drain on the network is huge with VDI compared to a standard environment as you're "streaming" applications along with data.

I can see the accountants getting their hands on it and looking like this:
Cost of Servers(Standard with huge edge) + Cost of Network (Standard with huge edge) + Cost of Local Hardware(VDI with slight edge) + Cost of Support (VDI with arguably huge edge) + Cost of Security (VDI with arguably less incidents)

Then you have BYOD. But I don't think we're to the place culturally where we can expect all workers to have a tablet and come to work. I'm talking again about an enterprise level environment (5000+ employees)- not an office with 20 people where the challenges and disadvantages are completely different. And, again, I'd argue that security is a little bit of an illusion as one can easily pull something off of a remote session onto your the hardware and suddenly it's not a secure environment anymore. Or, even better, I've heard of instances of people just tossing stuff that shouldn't be publicly available onto their dropbox account or whatever and we all know how secure "The Cloud"(TM) is.

SI

[jeff061]

We can take offline if you like, don't want to pound away on this thread much more. But quickly.

Cost of Servers(Standard with huge edge) + Cost of Network (Standard with huge edge)
This is pretty far off base. 50 desktops on 1 server, thousands of desktops on a couple of switches, I don't think you're taking into account the basic benefits of virtualization. Not to mention you are going to get a hell of a lot more perfomance out of a $200 thin client and 1/50th of that servers resources than a $600 desktop.

Like I said earlier, the only place you lose on price is the licensing of the VDI management software(View/XenDesktop). It's a very expensive upfront cost and is the key point where people tend to fail to justify it.

BYOD is something employees are forcing IT to adapt, not the other way around. And is only one benefit in addition to what I had mentioned earlier.

[johnnyshaka]

Originally Posted by jeff061

We can take offline if you like, don't want to pound on way on this thread much more. But quickly.

No need to go offline...how about a new thread because I'm interested in the discussion as well.

[jeff061]

By the way....I run a team of consultants if anyone needs some work done .

[Galaril]

Originally Posted by jeff061

By the way....I run a team of consultants if anyone needs some work done .

Good to know and I assume you goes are national or able to travel where need to in the US at least?

[jeff061]

Yeah. We have 2 main offices, east and midwest, but we'll cover national.

[Desnudo]

These guys really are idiots. Who wants the shitty OS? The only thing BB has going for it is the cool form factor and now they want to eliminate that.

What they should be doing is canning the OS and running android on their hardware.

RIM Planning to License BB10 to Other Manufacturers

[Marc Vaughan]

Originally Posted by Desnudo

These guys really are idiots. Who wants the shitty OS? The only thing BB has going for it is the cool form factor and now they want to eliminate that.

Actually I disagree hugely with that - if they'd open sourced BB earlier when it still had huge user numbers then developers would have followed and handset manufacturers leapt at the chance ... heck even now I think it boasts bigger numbers than windows mobile.

(as such I think its a decent roll of the dice imho)

If they go to Android then they've basically admitted defeat - even if android get a majority share of the market they'd only get a small slice of that pie and nothing from store revenues ... if BB goes open source then they get licencing fee's from the store etc.

[Desnudo]

Originally Posted by Marc Vaughan

Actually I disagree hugely with that - if they'd open sourced BB earlier when it still had huge user numbers then developers would have followed and handset manufacturers leapt at the chance ... heck even now I think it boasts bigger numbers than windows mobile.

(as such I think its a decent roll of the dice imho)

If they go to Android then they've basically admitted defeat - even if android get a majority share of the market they'd only get a small slice of that pie and nothing from store revenues ... if BB goes open source then they get licencing fee's from the store etc.

Assuming anyone would develop on the BB platform. That horse is out of the barn. They should turn their BB proprietary stuff into Android apps that come pre-installed on their phones and that you can buy in the Play store.

[Marc Vaughan]

Originally Posted by Desnudo

Assuming anyone would develop on the BB platform. That horse is out of the barn. They should turn their BB proprietary stuff into Android apps that come pre-installed on their phones and that you can buy in the Play store.

I think if they approached it right people would ...

Simply put price things so its appealing to developers - say 20/80 instead of the 30/70 standard which Apple/Google are presenting with revenue cuts generally.

They've still quite a decent eco-system in place, they just need to expand and make it more competitive before its totally eclipsed.

(I know developers who are earning a decent crust by concentrating on Windows Mobile - they're doing well because there little competition there presently, BB would be the same initially - it'd gain at least some traction just so long as they act fast)