Two years ago BlackBerries dominated at Control Group. Back then, if you picked up one of the orange Nerf balls that dotted the CG office landscape and threw it, chances were that you would hit someone who kept a BlackBerry Curve in their pocket. I have fond memories of the original Curve with its beautiful screen and extremely tactile keyboard, as it was the last BlackBerry I ever carried.

As an early adopter, I made the jump from the Curve to the first Android device, the G1. This began a change in the office where everyone was looking for a way to get away from the BlackBerry and get on to something else, be it an Android, iPhone, or Windows Mobile. Within a year, iPhones and Androids were quickly becoming the norm.  It got to a point where we had a New Year’s prediction that CG would be a BlackBerry free company by 2012– and it was almost correct. How close did we get?

From a company that was at a time 100% BlackBerry, we now have the following:



So what changed that caused such a radical shift? In short, the mobile landscape did, and what didn’t change was the Blackberry.

With a new emphasis on touchscreen devices that did more than just act as an email life vest, BlackBerry held fast to what made them the king. While they still focused on enterprise level email with Exchange servers, Apple and Google were providing media rich devices with more screen real estate and features than any BlackBerry had ever offered. As its competitors updated and perfected their devices, they took aim at the mighty BB… the iPhone with stronger Exchange functionality, and Android with it’s unique ability to sync seamlessly with Google Apps, as well as increased Exchange functionality.

A series of rushed products like the BB Storm and the BB App World just further showed that RIM didn’t get it. With a new line of hybrid touch devices still featuring the iconic keyboard, they’re still left with an OS that is tricky to code for at best, and has such a small market share that many developers don’t even bother writing apps for it.

RIM’s ace in the hole though, is the wildly successful BB Messenger. While it’s not enough to reel back the customers they have lost, it’s their bargaining chip with other mobile companies. Recent news suggests that RIM is being shopped around to their competitors, more specifically to Samsung. Fearing it is not long for this mobile world, they are trying to keep alive by licensing their software or by being bought out, either completely or by selling divisions.

It feels a bit premature to start writing a eulogy for the BlackBerry but it’s about that time to start notifying the family that this is likely Gramma BB’s last Thanksgiving. Even as a faithful Android user, I still reminisce about the old BlackBerry days when fast email and a good keyboard was all I needed. You could go 3 days without putting your BlackBerry on a charger, you didn’t have to worry about how much built in storage it had, and you didn’t have to worry about apps or games… it was a simpler device for a simpler time.

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In response to an internal thread on this article…

I’m right there with folks crying foul when Apple does wrong, but I don’t buy this one. Apple’s “bastardization” of the ePub format helps push the format forward, just like Opera and Mozilla’s modifications to HTML yielded HTML 5, Microsoft’s modifications led to OpenXML and practically everybody’s Wi-Fi implementations led to 802.11n. I’m not saying it’s on as grand a scope as that, but I do think it’s a small part of that same sort of momentum. All Apple did was add some extra CSS tricks that weren’t present in the ePub standard and then tweaked the MIME type so the files identify themselves as being slightly different than standard ePub files. If nobody built on top of open standards like this, then nobody would use open standards because they would develop uselessly slowly.

And while e-ink displays are indeed better for reading than LCD’s, I take issue with the headaches-because-of-refresh claim. There is no refresh on LCD’s, just per-pixel changes when the image changes. Tablet LCD’s are the same as your desktop display, which folks read on all day long without issue.

I still prefer a tree-killing paper book to both, though!

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I like this blog post from the Harvard Business Review.

Control Group has a culture that attracts certain kinds of people. Sure, the culture changes as the company does, but there are certain things that definitely stick from iteration to iteration. I think that our acceptance and interest in innovation is one of them.  I think that we should all be innovating. Everyone has something to contribute, no matter what your title or role is.

So as an FYI, R&D is open to everyone and we will be scheduling more of those drive-bys to accommodate more schedules and interests.

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