Not saying this is typical, but here is my experience of Blackberry.
I was in IT support at the time they came out. One of the things I hated about IT support, and I found it common with most colleagues, was the idea that if you are in IT, every thing with a plug or batteries is some how part of an IT person's skill set. Because we are the clever mysterious people who can fix the server, we must also be able to explain the MD's new HiFi to him, fix the microwave or mobile phone, or some such.
So, out comes Blackberry and it suddenly becomes the executive's toy of choice, and we were expected to support them. No one asked, there was no meeting or consideration, they just bought Blackberrys themselves, bought them in and expected us to be configuring and supporting them. Its was like a suddenly change in infrastructure that just arrived because individuals insisted on it. And because usually these were senior people, management expected us to play ball. It was kinda like the whole system being windows and one day some one installs Linux and expects it to be instantly supported and integrated, regardless of whether or not the company software actually ran on it. And early on, that wasn't trivial.
So, what happened in my IT circles was that Blackberry got a bad name because its was a toy executives lumped on us with out any consideration, let alone some sort of discussion, and heaven forbid, planning. So, the sort of back ground vibe was negative, and for many I know, remains so.
So, even though all these years on it is likely to be very unfair, I still see Blackberry as representing arrogant unthinking executives and the resulting headaches, and there for negative.
Edit:
And I missed the obvious. Im so brain dead at times....
It is suggested that employees buying their own phones killed the Blackberry. Yet, ironically, in my experience at least, it was employees buying Blackberrys that got them their traction in the first place.
A little aside... Developers really should read your post twice and understand exactly how admins think. These types of departments are usually slow moving, and really hinder progress. When you read about the people who are stuck on old browsers and need legacy IE support, it's probably because of all the "planning and work" that would be required to upgrade.
Anyway, I've always advocated dumping legacy browser support because once the right people have problems viewing the web, fires get lit and the job gets escalated.
The only people who can't upgrade their own browsers are the ones with an IT team standing in their way.
I think that's a little unfair. Admins' responsibility to keep everything running, all the time, is their top priority. As an organization scales, it pays off greatly to enforce some homogeneity - especially as the ratio of non-technical users increases. Not everybody can manage their own browser/office suite/mail client, but they always need it to do their work.
If you want bleeding edge software across the organization, admins need to have enough extra free time to coordinate the rollout and get the training to support it. Recall the administrators "prime directive" - fix what's broken. If the admin team is swamped with tickets all the time, you'll be stuck with legacy stuff, because they don't have enough time to adapt.
We have a joke at work that new stuff gets done during our "infinite amount of free time".
It's normally not an admin's choice to stay slow and out of date. This is especially the case in a non-IT-centric business, which nonetheless uses technology to function.
Typically, the issue is like this:
1) Management demands that a specific solution is installed, and ignores IT's complaints
2) The solution requires an environment IE 7 (or Windows XP, or... take your pick)
The admins now have two problems: they need to convince management to move away from the old solution to a new one (another capital expense), in addition to maintaining a hateful, old environment so that the business doesn't break.
Senior management doesn't realize they dug their own grave, and refuses to pay for the capex "just" to have the latest version of the solution, when the business is seemingly working just fine on the current environment.
Eventually, after much praying and finger crossing, only one of the two things saves the admins:
1) The solution is upgraded to support modern software
2) The environment becomes unsupported, and management is forced to reconsider the upgrade.
So my advice to not support older browsers holds. If the web essentially stops working, the powers that be will insist on upgrading. Developers will be doing you a favor. If you've got software that still only runs on IE7, for example, you'll have to install Chrome or Firefox.
Totally agree - I know of at least one IT manager in 2000 who was fired by the CFO (acting CIO) because he wasn't prepared to support her Blackberry on the mail server (we weren't an exchange shop - Netscape Mail server).
More like he was fired because he didn't have the social intelligence to say "Sure boss, we'll sort that out for you, I'll pull together a business case for the migration and let's meet on monday pm to go through it for sign off."
"No, I won't" is the wrong answer. The above comes to the same thing, but in my experience is not going to result in dismissal.
He could advise her and tell her why it is a bad idea, and if she still wants to use it, he must support it.
Instead he said no, which is fine from his side. But If you don't want to do something the company expect from you, don't be surprised if you get fired.
He was the kind of guy who thought he knew best. He also refused to add a new VPN technology when he was asked to add PPTP to our already existing Netscreen IPSec environment.
Basically, he didn't like being told by the not particularly technically knowledgeable CFO/CIO what technologies to deploy. We had Netscape Calendar/Email. He knew Netscape Calendar/Email. He wasn't interested in deploying a new Calendar and Email technology that he didn't know. The new boss really wanted support for her Blackberry.
To some degree it worked out well for everyone. He was fired, and went to a new job where he got to work with Unix Technologies, and the new IT Manager was hired to deploy Microsoft Exchange.
I concur, and still see that sometimes it really is the right way to just say flat out No.
Ive tried to play ball and call to meetings for distasteful and wasteful requests/requirements from business/manager people, but its such a drain on my energy as a developer, I just began saying flat out No. I take the risks of getting fired, but I will not be bitter 10 years from now for sitting in meetings discussing what is a change request and what is a requirement with people who have not read one paragraph on software engineering, trying to get me to once again change the functionality of the app because of their change in opinion, or trying to just get me to do things just because they say so. Fuck that, and fuck no. Im out. If I am expected to be a code monkey at a workplace, thats not the workplace I want to be at.
In some ways that's your job :) If I was managing you and the situations that you describe came up I'd probably be saying things like "That's why we have antocv - he's normally right, and what do we know anyway". Possibly I'd get "We should boot him and hire a monkey", and if that is the rational thing to do I'd be thinking, "you know what, I need to let antocv know that he is wasting his talents here"
Also I would start looking for a new gig myself...
But it's a different context and situation to the one above. If I came to you as a software engineer and said; "Antocv, our new customer is insisting that we add an extra step in our QA to get our contract signed off" I would expect you to either say "Sure, no problem" or "My friend, it sounds easy, but the thing is that doing it will sink us. Because..." if you said "No" and left it at that I'd conclude this is a guy who I can't work with.
The thing is the reasonableness of the behaviour - if I come to you with a request that you can fulfil reasonably and you are paid to do it, you should do it, or find a way to let me know that I do not really want you to do it in the first place. The "because" is the critical thing; random acts of rebellion are not helpful.
But be clear; nor are dickheads from HR/Accts/Sales appearing and announcing that they know how to do the jobs of skilled professionals by remote control. That's every bit as unacceptable as uncooperative techies, and if you are in an environment where that washes it's definitely for the short term only. It just means that money is being wasted and no one knows what to do.
Either leave now, or put up with it until they go bust; there is no third way.
Thanks for your insightful comment. It is as you described, dependent on situation. For me, I will perform this last project as best I can and leave for new challenges, its only about 3 months left. My plan is to bring up these issues in a diplomatic way on next retrospective, let them know money and time is wasted and ways it can be improved, for example our "standup meetings" every morning inspired by scrum are all more than 30-minutes long, a suggestion would be to just impose the 5-minute rule for a start. I dont know, Im up in the project right now, Ill think more when it settles down towards the end.
And I'd fire him too, any IT manager that can't support a Blackberry doesn't deserve to be an IT manager. Not to mention his bad attitude in not even trying.
Yes, the article itself is a load of nonsense, with this gem in it:
BlackBerrys have never been particularly attractive, cutting-edge, or user-friendly.
As you say, they were definitely seen as attractive, cutting-edge, and user-friendly at one point because the execs forced them into companies. Pretty much right up until the day the iPhone came out. They went from great to old fashioned almost overnight.
it doesn't like you're a great fit for IT support. It's people like you that give IT a bad name. The same people that tell employees that can't upgrade Firefox 3.6.23 because they don't "support" newer versions. IT either reboot or reimage to fix any problem anyway. The first thing I do it get off the IT support system by installing Linux.
IT keep servers machine running, they don't care that those machine aren't doing anything useful. The server software stopped being useful years ago yet they keep it running at all costs because their job performance is tied to uptime. When I work our yearly mandatory training requires Firefox 3.6.23, IE6 or Netscape! People have to borrow loaner laptops that nobody dare upgrade just to do the training classes. This is thanks to our IT department not wanting to support "newer" technology. Eventually we get a new VP who fires all these people that don't understand that people want to use iPhones and VPNs and WebEx on their iPad and it's not ITs job to put roadblocks in their way, but instead to figure out how to support it.
"I still see Blackberry as representing arrogant unthinking executives and the resulting headaches" - you mean the people that pay you and figure out how to stay in business despite your best efforts to thwart it?
Blackberry made a tremendously successful high featured phone. Then Steve Jobs and Apple released a full-fledged minicomputer that fit in the palm, with a usable interface, that happened to also function as a phone.
The iPhone killed off more than the Blackberry. It killed all off all phones in favor of small computers that happen to function as phones.
Totally missed the mark. Blackberry was the ultimate email machine. They created a high quality, easy to use and secure device for communicating with email, phone and pin. As a company you could deploy like 100k of the things with two FTEs supporting them.
They didn't see the world beyond that. There wasn't an even reasonably decent browser in 2009, when I stopped caring. Apple and android changed everything by creating an Internet consumption device.
I don't mean this in a snarky way but did you have a blackberry? At the time is was a quantum leap over a cellphone. I felt the same way as I would later when I got an iPhone version 1. It was a huge productivity lift that let me be mobile with a small computer for email, calendar and then basic but at the time powerful apps like weather/browser etc. If they'd done BB 10 3 years earlier they might have made it.
Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive. What they hide is vital.
iOS is responsible for more than the raw numbers suggest. iOS begat Android, WP7, and countless lesser imitations. Whether this was through inspiration, as I believe, or outright theft, as Apple maintains, is immaterial.
The fact is that the modern smartphone market was born with the introduction of the iPhone. All else before was prelude.
Google acquired Android before 2 years before iOS came about. I think it was more a case of "adjacent possible" developments [1] happening in parallel and learning from each other (as great artists are prone to do).
Your first link is actually debunking that. They had prototypes that looked like Blackberry devices, yes, but in the same video they show a prototype with a touchscreen-driven UI as well.
Now have a look at the touchscreen UI itself, it borrows heavily from blackberry style bottom bar. The video was uploaded on Nov 11, 2007....iPhone released in June 2007. (Let's keep aside the fact that Eric Schmidt sat on Apple's board) Six months is not much of a developmental time, but not exactly less time to polish such stuff for a company the size of Google. See the progress here (May 2008): http://news.cnet.com/2300-1046_3-6240422.html
Only Touchscreen UI shown and much more polished. HTC Dream was released in Oct 2008.
Android was a substantially different system before the iPhone, very much concentrating on keyboard input as a sort of Blackberry alternative. Google saw which way to shift, though, unlike RIM.
Actually in the early days of the iPhone even Engadget didn't count it as a smartphone because it didn't run apps. Of course this changed later. What was considered a smartphone was mostly a Palm Treo, Motorola or HTC device. Some had Windows CE some had other OSes. The real addition of the iPhone was that while everyone was focused on features that they could sell to geeks and executives, Apple focused on consumer level usability. In other words, iOS did NOT beget neither Android nor WP7 but showed the industry that there are other important things that drive success.
What you see in the data is just the percentage that the red (Apple) takes.
But you fail to see that:
1) red went there from nowhere. In a totally unrelated industry from zero to hero.
2) all other colors, from that point on, started offering stuff just like what red introduced. Before the iPhone's introduction, the top 10 phones looked totally unlike it. So much unlike that people thought it would be a flop, and considered the total lack of physical keyboard "insane" (!). After that introduction, all they started look totally the same.
(Including Android, whose prototypes shown just before the iPhone announcement were crappy, 2006 like regular phones, with physical keyboards and a small screen -- and whose firsr version, introduced a whole year after the iPhone was just like it).
Android's appearance coincides with iPhones ability to securely interoperate with Exchange. Executives started demanding active sync access for those iPhones they were playing with at home.
Android didn't have an ability to do that for awhile unless you used apps like Touchdown. IMO, android started hyper growth in 2010-2011.
I ran a 100,000 seat exchange environment from 2008-2012. We had 50 active sync devices in 2008. 3,000 in late '08, 8k in 2010 and around 10-11k today. During that same period, BlackBerry went from 5,000 to less than 500.
It takes that long (and more) for a platform entrenched with enterprise users to lose its dominance. Those are slower to adapt than the end user market (consider enterprises still using IE6).
Plus, the original iPhone didn't have Exchange support and some other stuff RIM users would want to ditch RIM, it got that later.
I'm sure we can include Android in the GP's assessment. It's all part of the same movement of computer-grade devices replacing phones; and the chart makes it overwhelmingly clear the pair were a lethal combination.
Apple's "Godphone" keynote was a rude awakening for an industry who had dragged their heels for years, providing a rubbish experience for users and locking all but the largest developers from any access to their devices.
"The rumors swirling around RIM and LG are centered around exits and some suggest Nokia will follow. [...] Earlier last decade the exits were prompted by loss of brand value and subsequent loss of distribution. This decade disruption brought upon by mobile computing brings with it new business models centered on ecosystems and value captured through software and services."
That data is aggregated. You have everyone from a CEO to a college student with no financial support from her parents on there. It doesn't show who's buying which phone, nor does it show the shift from "feature phones" to smartphones. The trendsetters were (are?) buying iPhones, which has always been a premium device which Apple wants to make substantial profits on. Samsung competes on price,
In 1998-2002, Blackberries really were the peak of ease of use and efficient communication/calendar management. Every executive/financial trader/beltway insider had one. The early 800/900 series Blackberry were like the iPhone of 2007.
In 2007 the iPhone was seen as an oddity by those who used their blackberries for business - without a keyboard, and really rudimentary communication tools, it wasn't ready for real-time business communication. But wow - that browser, and maps app was something else; and then Apple let third parties develop applications for the iPhone...
By 2009, after a couple iterations of the iPhone, I was running a network engineering team, and provided everyone on the team a blackberry so they could communicate real time with each other (We had a corporate BES server). Every single one of them was left in a desk drawer, as people ignored them and just connected their iPhone to their iMap account and used SMS for the real time stuff.
I just got back from a 4 week engagement in Singapore, and I was working daily with fifteen people in five organizations across four companies, distributed across three sites and field visits. We had to perform real-time communication during some particularly tricky diagnostic event on hardware, at the same time we were tracking some configuration remediation in a meter-lab. Every single person present (except for one poor Field Engineering manager from California who showed up with a non-GSM android) kept in touch with WhatsApp. We didn't even have to supply the four college students we hired to do some field-evaluations with phones - they showed up with their own devices (all Androids), and we simply added their accounts to our group chat system. Latency was on the order of a second even with Singapore's surprisingly iffy data environment (at least from the perspective of my California AT&T iPhone)
I think a major contributor to the death of blackberry was a combination of iMap ports open to the internet + Exchange Support in iPhone + awesome replacements for BBMS (inexpensive SMS, Viber, Whatsapp, etc...) - every key advantage of the Black Berry, with the exception of that keyboard, has an equivalent or better replacement today on the Android/IOS platform, with the addition of a world class app suite that's available on the Android/iPhone, but will never, ever, come to the Blackberry (except in the form of Android sideloading - but that further kills the need to develop blackberry specific apps)
Yours is the first time I've ever seen IMAP "spelled" iMap. In fact, I couldn't even connect the dots between the two until the second time you used it.
The power of Lower and Upper cases. The visual system recognizes words by its shape.
I would probably had seen IMAP thousands of times. iMap is the first time and has a very similar shape to iMac that is very known for me as I had several of those.
I don't really know why he starts with lowerCase, them Upper case in the middle, then lower again.
Off topic of course, but for those curious, WhatsApp had a blog post a while back about how they managed to use Erlang + FreeBSD to get up to 2m concurrent TCP connections on a single server.
Here's my 2 cents, I worked as an intern (coop) and have subsequently worked in other tech companies in Waterloo that have ex-RIM employees.
I think the problem was mainly managers, a lot of the managers didn't program, some held cs degrees but they hadn't programmed in a while to the point where they really couldn't really access the code, so basically never really looked at code (the code itself was ok because other programmers did). However, what did happen was a lot of managers started accessing their team based on how much they looked like they were doing, in short how busy they looked. Some of the smartest developers are terrible and office politics, emails and at meetings . Without emails or engaging in meetings it gave an impression that the developers didn't care, I've seen some incredible developers get fired because they didn't fit the "company culture." This was acceptable because "company culture" was in at the time, but it was just a way to support manager bias. For example, I knew this guy who would usually come to work late and only answer emails at lunch and keep a fairly chill attitude, but would usually stay late 6-7 until he did his 8+ hours, however in the eyes of the manager who was there from 9-5, the picture looked completely different, he was fired a few months later. Now I was there for a short time and only part of one team, so I can't speak for the whole organization, but I've worked for other tech firms in the area whose managers were ex-RIM and they basically did the exact same thing. In short,
1) having mangers that are heading an engineering team should be programming
2) employees should be peer-reviewed and not at the mercy of the managers (a lot of sucking up happens when the manager has that much power)
This probably isn't the main thing that killed RIM, there were probably hundreds of reasons, but over time this put in a culture of complacency, and there probably isn't much upper management could have done, because it was all done for the sake of improving "company culture"
One guy from my university comp-sci class became a project manager in RIM.
He was absolutely clueless, couldn't do any homework and just copied stuff from other people or ask for help ALL the time.
I take issue with you criticizing a student for asking for help. It seems to be an issue in comp sci; some proportion of students are always watching for others to ask for help so they can smugly lord their infinite self-learned (lol) knowledge over them.
It depends on the understanding people come away with. In some cases people will just get their hand held right through anything practical and come away not actually understanding the material.
That is different to people who don't understand something but ask the right questions so that they understand and can apply in future.
So...once users were able to exert a choice, they opted for products which benefitted themselves more? This argument seems to admit that Blackberry products were inferior at the time. It's like saying that what killed IE6 was allowing people to install Firefox.
The iPhone was so good that users brought them into the enterprise any way they could - even paying out of pocket. RIM thought security/IT and company paid phones would be a wall Apple wouldn't be able to penetrate. Wrong.
I'm pretty sure that what killed IE6 was IE7. I'm also pretty sure that is keeping IE8 & 9 from finally shuffling off too is people being prevented from installing a browser of their choosing in their workplace.
I'm pretty sure that MS & corporate IT depts were more than willing to stay on IE6 forever if they could. The gap between IE6 & IE7 was larger than almost any other IE release.
Legacy IE is maintained by the corporate IT Kata I used in another comment on this thread.
"Sure Boss, I'll sort that out for you, I'll get a business case for the migration together over the weekend, can we meet on Monday to go through it and sign off?"
Moving off IE6/7 costs £x k, because there are 1->1000 applications (I know my company has about 30 major ones) that are known to need changes to function on later versions properly (even with compatibility mode) and 100+ that will need some testing.
Now, when I say these applications need work, often the problems are incredibly trivial, but in a corporate these things (a button has moved, a menu item doesn't work but the button does, you need to hit the ok button not hit <enter> etc. GENERATE HELPDESK CALLS!
And the calls don't go away after 2 days as the users get used to it - they are ongoing, there will be escalations, your manager's manager will be teased at the SMT event, worse your manager's managers peers in other corporates will get war stories featuring your manager in A BAD LIGHT (think about the implications of that) all of which is unfair and silly.
But this is what will happen.
Ok - you get the case done, you see your boss. The number is £30k; is it in the budget? No.
The consequence of not doing it? Your manager shows the case to her manager.
The consequence of doing it without the migration: see above.
The author says, "BlackBerrys have never been particularly attractive, cutting-edge, or user-friendly." I've never actually owned a BlackBerry, but I was under the impression that they were some of the best devices around, especially for doing business, before the iPhone came along. I've heard people say that they still believe the BlackBerry had the most superior email functionality of any device to date. The iPhone changed all that, of course, but before, I think they were very good devices.
That speaks to how bad everybody else was. The first BlackBerry was technologically similar to contemporary PalmOS devices with a GSM module bolted on. Boring. Predictable. But they actually worked.
RIM won by showing up and not being totally incompetent. They lost by being complacent.
Agreed. Email was awesome. And integration to calendar a must for on the to folks. I'm not sure Apple ever cared enough to completely close that gap. That's also the reason hardcore hold outs cite today (plus physical keyboard)
The title is referring to 'Corporate Employees' as opposed to employees of Blackberry.
The Thesis goes: employees bought iPhones and brought them to work, enough (or senior enough) employees were able to force IT departments to support them. Afterwards no-one wanted to use their crappy old phones.
If only this could happen for Browsers, too!
I think it's time to start a campaign for 'Bring Your Own Browser To Work Day".
> I think it's time to start a campaign for 'Bring Your Own Browser To Work Day".
It is entirely possible that that is what tablets are. I suspect that some of the crufty old "we see every packet" IT groups the notion that you can have your own tablet at work getting 4G network access outside the company control structures is exceptionally challenging.
It already happens to an extent. I work in an environment where we have very limited control over our desktops. Can't install software, can't use the command prompt, etc. IE7 is the mandated browser. I'd estimate that at maybe a third of staff run either Firefox and Chrome alongside IE7. Neither requires Administrative privileges to install and so users just get on with it.
Blackberry was the best smartphone with a keyboard. It was not only the choice of enterprises, but also the choice of users who do not like touchscreen as a keyboard. The smaller screen (because of the presence of the keyboard)) means also better battery duration. They have killed all these advantages to become a pale copy of iphone with a bad UX, half assed between full touchscreen and keyboard. I think that copying iphone ergonomy was a bad marketing move that place them as a follower. I think blackberry could succeed as the leader of smartphones with keyboard. Now, they have lost their soul. Of course, this is only a single aspect, the other points described in many other posts are also important.
> Consumers care about attractive designs, user-friendly interfaces, and innovative features.
Tangentially- when I went to check out the Z10 it was locked in a demo mode. I couldn't figure out how to look at anything on the phone that they didn't want me to see with "helper" sales pitch notes. I finally found a real phone one of the employees was carrying and was able to try it out (and buy something different).
I couldn't believe they (or AT&T) would think so little about their customers and providing a real experience on the device. It insulted me. Maybe it changed later...
I'd love it if Blackberry switched to Android. The top-end Bolds look great, and you just can't beat their keyboards for smashing out a length of text longer than a sentence.
This article suggests that BB lost because it did not focus on the consumer soon enough. I'm going to completely disagree and argue that even if they had done this, they would still be dying now. Their fate would have been the same had they made consumer friendly phones in 2008.
In 2008 I believed android would dominate the smartphone market. This was even before the first android phone was brought to market. Most consumers had not even heard of android back then and the iPhone was quickly gaining market share. Why did I think this back then?
What killed BB is, at core, the result of Geography. It is not only the fate of societies, a la Jared Diamond, but the fates of tech companies that geography can influence. In 2008, I was living in northern California and you could sense the amount of developer interest in android. What android did and BB couldn't do (or really try) was to win over developers. Many were upset at Apple's process for publishing apps. Google did everything to address those concerns. Instead of winning over consumers first, android won over the developers who then made the apps to bring those consumers. BB was just too far away and too out of touch to see any of this.
The world is not flat. Place matters. If it were as simple as focusing on consumers, why did Nokia lose despite doing this all along? -Geography! And why did android win despite not initially focusing on consumers? (the G1 was a crappy phone). The winners (android and IOS) won because they're located in Silicon valley where most of the best developers are. The losers (Nok, RIMM) lost because they weren't.
I wonder how the theory is supposed to explain RIM and Nokia's great success in the past. Are we supposed to ignore that because they're failing now? No success lasts forever, and Apple and Google too shall pass.
Apple and Google weren't even in the field during Rim and Nok's best years. If they had never entered, it's possible Rimm and Nok would still be the top dogs now.
I don't mean to say 'all' the best are... just 'many'. There are top developers everywhere and I hope I didn't imply otherwise. And I am not in California now myself (and certainly not an 'sv type').
What really killed BBRY was not providing any added value. And actually destroying any added value that they had over competitors (I made another comment about that in another thread — I don't want to get too annoying).
The "BYOD" culture is some crucial damage for BlackBerry. But what will wipe them off the map isn't really that, but rather, not being even an option for a second device, enterprise-only. Because they've got nothing to add.
The enabler for the death of Blackberry was Microsoft Exchange / ActiveSync. When executives realized that the much cooler, fun, life-integrated iPhone could also hook into their email, that forced IT's hand in allowing alternative platforms.
If the iPhone didn't appeal to the top tier, the Blackberry would have reigned supreme in corporations.
I was in IT support at the time they came out. One of the things I hated about IT support, and I found it common with most colleagues, was the idea that if you are in IT, every thing with a plug or batteries is some how part of an IT person's skill set. Because we are the clever mysterious people who can fix the server, we must also be able to explain the MD's new HiFi to him, fix the microwave or mobile phone, or some such.
So, out comes Blackberry and it suddenly becomes the executive's toy of choice, and we were expected to support them. No one asked, there was no meeting or consideration, they just bought Blackberrys themselves, bought them in and expected us to be configuring and supporting them. Its was like a suddenly change in infrastructure that just arrived because individuals insisted on it. And because usually these were senior people, management expected us to play ball. It was kinda like the whole system being windows and one day some one installs Linux and expects it to be instantly supported and integrated, regardless of whether or not the company software actually ran on it. And early on, that wasn't trivial.
So, what happened in my IT circles was that Blackberry got a bad name because its was a toy executives lumped on us with out any consideration, let alone some sort of discussion, and heaven forbid, planning. So, the sort of back ground vibe was negative, and for many I know, remains so.
So, even though all these years on it is likely to be very unfair, I still see Blackberry as representing arrogant unthinking executives and the resulting headaches, and there for negative.
Edit: And I missed the obvious. Im so brain dead at times....
It is suggested that employees buying their own phones killed the Blackberry. Yet, ironically, in my experience at least, it was employees buying Blackberrys that got them their traction in the first place.