Geek Life 3.1

In just three short days Blackberry will debut their last-ditch effort to get back into the handset wars … a nicely designed, extremely capable, and surprisingly modern product called the Passport.

Three short days.

Or, to look at it another way, five days after ten million people went out and spent their money on something else.

Perhaps Blackberry sees no pressing need to try and attract up to ten million customers with an attractive new product that has been ready to go – yet inexplicably kept under wraps – for the past month. Or perhaps they really have no clue.

Ten million. Zero clue. You do the math.

One month after the abortive – and quickly cancelled – “launch” of the cross-platform version of Blackberry Messenger, the folks in Waterloo have given it another try. And this time it actually works! Of course, if you didn’t sign up before today you won’t be able to sign in … and there is no actual word from Blackberry on how long you will have to wait. If you signed up already, you got the download link via email. For everyone else, this is where you can grab it, but you won’t be able to use it. Yet.

As for the app itself, it seems to have almost nothing in common with the disaster version that was prematurely ejaculated to the world last month. In fact, it’s very much like Blackberry 10: Unspectacular, a bit sluggish, but generally competent and would have been just fine as a release in 2009. Now? It just feels a bit … dated. But, oddly enough, not as dated as the BB10 OS, which is both interesting (to me) and troubling (for Blackberry). Why doesn’t BB10 have at least this level of polish?

Over the next 48 hours there will be a lot of talk about the faded fortunes and inevitable demise of Blackberry (neé Research In Motion). Between the company being forced to kneel at the financial confessional today and the insider’s look back that will appear in the Globe And Mail tomorrow (hot tip: it features actual interviews with both Mike Lazaridis and Slippery Jim Balsillie, and you definitely want to read it) the amount of grist that will be fed into this particular mill will be astounding.

I haven’t seen the actual copy yet, but if Mike and Jim do anything but accept full and utter blame for all of this they are being either completely disingenuous or – even at this late date – they still don’t have even the barest understanding of what is going on. Either way, these aren’t guys I would trust to run a lemonade stand at this point, because the actual history is pretty clear:

2007 – Apple releases the iPhone, but anyone with even the tiniest shred of comprehension realizes that the “phone” part of this is just a smokescreen. This is really the first decently-powerful and pleasant-to-use pocket-sized computer, and the “phone” is really just another app. But by positioning it as a phone, Apple has a lever into familiar consumer ground and avoids the “tech shock” that can stall a truly disruptive new product. Every other handset maker in the world saw immediately what was happening and trashed their existing “smart” phones and replaced them with iPhone copies based on Android … every manufacturer except one. The management cabal at Blackberry’s head said “Apps, schmapps. What people want is a phone that can do email, period. Apple’s phone is pretty but ours does email better, so we will win.” At this point they set in stone what was going to be the corporate mantra for the next 6 years: Our way is the best way. Customers who want something else are wrong.

2008 – Along comes the Apple app store. Now your pocket computer doesn’t just do mail, web, messaging, weather, news (and of course, phone), it does … well, everything. If you can imagine it, there is an app for it. Now consuming, interacting with, and creating data on a pocket computer is even easier, since a one-purpose tool is almost always better than a “one interface fits all” solution. Developers flock to the new marketplace, users download and purchase apps at an astounding rate, iPhone sales grow exponentially … and Blackberry poo-poos the whole concept. All you need is a browser, they say (clever failing to see that even if that was true, their browser is a piece of unusable shit) and this app thing is just a fad. Remember: Our way is the best way. Customers who want something else are wrong.

2010 – Apple releases the iPad. With people now used to a decent mobile OS, the next step is to use it to the tablet (or compact computer) from being “something that you read the paper with on the can” to “a hand-held computing device that will suffice for a lot of people’s every day data tasks”. All of the other manufacturers again follow suit, quickly making Android-based iPad knockoffs. All except one, of course. Blackberry delays and waffles and when they do finally release a tablet, its essentially just an external display for an existing Blackberry handset. Because a tablet couldn’t possibly be anything useful unless there was a Blackberry to go with it, right? Repeat the mantra: Our way is the best way. Customers who want something else are wrong.

2010 – Blackberry acquires QNX. Okay, now we are getting somewhere. Having finally seen that a smartphone must now be a full-fledged pocket computer and have a proper touch-screen operating system, Blackberry goes out and buys a company that makes an excellent mobile OS. But do they use the already excellent QNX platform to reimagine and possibly recharge the dying Blackberry lineup? No, of course not. Instead they gut and cripple the QNX stuff – adding over a year to the development time and release dates of their “last ditch” handsets – to make it more “Blackberry-like”. Why? Repeat after me … our way is the best way. Customers who want something else are wrong.

And yet, despite more than five years of absolute bungling by the “we know better than you” draconian top-level of management, there was still a chance to right the ship as late as January of this year. Really. Blackberry had an ace in the hole … but they never played it. In fact, it’s a pretty safe bet to say that they never even knew that they held the card. Because while the marketing people focused on things that every other handset both already had and did better – the application switcher, the hub, the “flow” – they completely ignored something that would have set them apart from everyone else and could have made the Blackberry experience a superior one for a lot of people: A fully curated app store.

Everyone knows that app stores on all of the mobile ecosystems are loaded with reams of unusable crap. Having to navigate the minefield of useless, knockoff, or outright sleazy apps is a pain in the ass on iOS and an absolute crapshoot on Android. If Blackberry had taken the initiative and offered up an app store where every product is vetted for quality, honestly, and user experience they would have had something that no other ecosystem could touch. They even had the groundwork in place for this with the excellent “Built For Blackberry” program – all they had to do was make this the only way to get apps into the store, instead of a specialized extra.

So did they grab this unique opportunity and run with it? No, of course not. Instead they ignored their own app and developer ecosystem to the point where the “Blackberry World” store is far and away the worst app store on the planet … and when you are competing with the giant steaming pile of malware and useless crap that makes up the average Android marketplace, that is saying a lot. Instead of the promise and prestige and user satisfaction of the world’s only fully curated application ecosystem, they are left with a store where almost a third of the apps available are useless crap from a single developer, and the Windows Live Messenger app is still listed on the “Most Popular Apps” page, five full months after Microsoft pulled the plug on the actual service.

Somewhere the crew that was running the “Build For Blackberry” program must be chewing on their fists. Even if no one else did, they must have realized the potential there … but that would be potential based on extending and expanding on the capabilities of the handsets, and for the Powers That Be at Blackberry, that’s a non-starter. Why? Because Blackberries are perfect when they come out of the box. Who cares about apps? Or developers? Or the app store experience? Who cares that it looks like almost 40 percent of all handsets shipped this quarter are either unsold or returned by unhappy owners? What do they know?

Our way is the best way. Customers who want something else are wrong.

The Blackberry Q10 was supposed to be the product that got Blackberry back into the market, and bought them enough time to wean their “core audience” over to proper smartphones. The one-two punch of a traditional keyboard-based featurephone combined with access to all the shiny new things an actual smartphone can do was going to be the magic bullet that righted the ship, evened the keel, and got the company sailing back into the marketplace.

And yes, that was quite the tortured nautical reference, thank you.

Anecdotal evidence, however, points to not only shitty sales but suggests that the people who actually did buy these things are returning them in droves. Why? Because they don’t work. Check out this blog from a long-time Blackberry user and admitted fan. He wanted a Q10. He wanted to love the Q10. Instead he is bitter, frustrated, and angry. Very, very angry.

These are not my words. They are the words of a long-time Blackberry user and fan. Ouch.

So now what? Fast forward to September 27th. That’s when the mucky-mucks at Blackberry will trot out their quarterly results and it will be wildly interesting to see if they try and candy-coat the performance of the Q10. In the past (and like every other company that isn’t called “Apple”) RIM/Blackberry has always given numbers for “units shipped”, not “units sold”. But that all went to hell in a hand basket with the Playbook, because people finally realized that “units shipped” doesn’t mean shit if those units just sit in the back rooms at Best Buy until they are quietly returned to the company unsold and written off for staggering losses.

The shipped-versus-sold cat is out of the bag and it’s not going back in there any time soon. If things have well and truly changed at Blackberry, they will come out and call a spade a spade and admit that the product is a disaster, it hasn’t sold, and they need to make some big changes, and fast. Even better, someone will address – and dole out some responsibility and/or blame for – the interesting juxtaposition of 250 product testers being laid off just as you release a product that obviously hasn’t been tested. But if it’s still business-as-usual at RIM they will talk around this, throw out some numbers meant to pacify instead of inform, and everything goes back to square one. Again.

September 27th is three short weeks away. Does Blackberry finally change and try and move forward? Or does the inertia of the old guard just keep pushing them down the same path to eventual irrelevance and oblivion? The failure of the Q10 has Blackberry at the final crossroads. The last question is … which road will they take?

The first invites have gone out to participate in beta testing for the long-awaited (but probably far too late) cross-platform versions of BlackBerry Messenger. The invites are only for registered members of the “Beta Zone” but it might not be too late to throw your hat into the ring – I’m told that not all of the invites have gone out as of yet so now would be the time to sign up if you have any interest. Interestingly, despite owning iOS devices, I got an invite to test the Android beta. I guess it’s the thought that counts.