What is wrong with people who buy Blackberries?
Now obviously we’re talking about the phone not the fruit because blackberries are quite possible the most awesome fruit of all time. Now I was a little surprised myself, when I realized a company with such a kick ass name could start sucking so badly, but today I am here to absolve RIM of their responsibility for sucking like a gas powered prostitute. It is not RIM’s or the Canadian population as a whole’s fault for this, as much as I want to levy blame on a faceless corporation or a strange collection of people who enjoy living in the frozen part of North America. They have been blamed up and down in all sorts of ways but it just isn’t quite their fault. It is the user’s fault. All you people that have purchased or received a Blackberry device (unless it was a choice between that or an iPhone because I don’t like the taste of Steve Job’s cock in my mouth either) and made them the number one selling phone in the US for the past year or two have caused these problems. You took good hard consumer dollars and you voted for a lackluster device. Let me explain.
Blackberries did not initially suck. They were a viable alternative to Windows CE devices of the day that did move to simplify the end user experience of sending and receiving telecommunications while complicating the shit out of your network administrators life with pointless additional servers. To this end Blackberries did wonderful things. It allowed idiots/users to send emails and created jobs for the IT department and Blackberries call center in India every time their server dies. So what changed? Not a damn thing!!! RIM, in the face of an adoption rate that would give Apple a solid stiffy, sat on what laurels it had created and decided to let the market dictate its hardware and software business. They took that age old “hands off” Laissez-faire kind of supply and demand approach to their business. Enter problem or stupid consumer.
You idiots keep buying phones that were designed in the 90’s. What the hell is wrong with you? I can see why RIM is making these shit bricks for you people. You gobble them up faster than a fat kid at a cake sale. You buy them for your texting tween as a way to placate their smartphone desires even though Blackberries are about as smart as a lobotomized toothpick with brain damage. Having an HTML browser does not make it a smartphone. Having a keyboard does not mean it’s good for texting. Landscape slider feature phones would kick most blackberries ass in a serious comparison.
In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really matter. RIM’s attempt at overhauling themselves into a touch screen phone company and actually producing a decent smartphone failed because they were trying to hold onto their market share of consumers with poor decision making capabilities and an even lower capacity to operate electronic devices. Despite all this Blackberry will continue to sell uncontrollably well with marginal dips in overall market share and profits as time goes on and will ditch you luddite bastards by the way side when a major overhaul is necessary like our good friend Microsoft has done to all those Stockholm stricken (to borrow one of Simmon’s aphorisms) Windows Mobile fans out there. So to those of you still hammering away at your decade old Canadian designed keyboards, please tell us what the hell is wrong with you.
Related Posts
About The Author
“.. sucking like a gas powered prostitute.”
“.. smart as a lobotomized toothpick with brain damage.”
Matt, you’re a poet. Keep the similes rolling please.
LMAO! eeer…i mean… yes, i see your point!
I just wrote a real long-ass comment on one of DK’s Blackberry articles but at the end realized that his post was a month old with no activity… so I might as well copypaste it here, relatively on topic.
To an extent I’d like to think it’s about the best technology will win, but a lot of it is about brands, not new operating systems, and Blackberry used to be the brand associated with what everyone else has so I might as well issue everyone in my company that too, and the brand associated with being no frills, no games, no cameras etc. There was a market for such phones, a big one. There was a time where people in management who knew little about phones and it went like this for them “Hey, we need phones. Which is the simplest phone? Just something so people can call and email, nothing else. Blackberry? I heard Lehman Brothers uses Blackberries. We’ll take 70.” That’s what happened at my former company at least.
Then the iphone and eventually Android shows up, and I bet the Blackberry people and their fans were thinking Yeah, they’ll be somewhat popular among kids but not people conducting business that’s so serious that they should have their own BES. That’s a big enough customer base, one that will usually deny their employees’ requests to use iphones on the company system and instead have two phones to carry around, that we have a comfortable lead among other guys that won’t go away.
This is a peripheral trait of their brand (at least it was news to me), but one worth mentioning: Apparently a lot of people overseas thought they had nothing to worry about in terms of being spied upon by anyone, especially the government, and RIM let them down on that one to anyone who asked.
But those other phones got so popular and enough people, including people with Blackberries, began to see what could be done on the likes of an iPhone or Droid, that companies left and right are now allowing their employees to use iPhones and Android phones. The CEO’s kid got a Droid, can’t help but show it off to his father, manages to dazzle the father with Compass Mode Street View, next thing everyone’s getting Droids.
Retrospectively if I were RIM what I would have done is create a sister brand, Blueberry, to take on Apple and Google head first with touch screens and fast GPUs and Nintendo integration and Netflix, all that jazz. No frills on one side and the opposite on the other. Between the two brands and lines of products I think they’d still be in front now.
you made me smile this morning
.. but those fabulous AT&T Blackberry Torch ads were to die for!
Weren’t they precious?
I feel you homey. The sheeple who still buy blackberries as their personal phone are just plain gone.