'BlackBerry' review: The comedy and tragedy of the innovator's dilemma

https://www.engadget.com/blackberry-movie-review-comedy-tragedy-innovators-dilemma-140115574.html

by cf100clunk • 3 years ago

130 110 3 years ago

engadget.com

dp-hackernews• 3 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230519223542/https://www.engad...

duxup• 3 years ago

Is this just a sorta-movie review / recap that kinda pretends to be about the book The Innovator's Dilemma?

dmix2• 3 years ago

Maybe he just read the book for the first time recently?

I have a habit of reading some books, getting really into them, and then relating everything I see to it.

janalsncm• 3 years ago

Sounds like a good book to me. Got any recent recs?

steveylang• 3 years ago

It's a real movie review (though pretty short):

BlackBerry has everything Apple's Tetris film lacked: human drama grounded in actual history, without the need to spice things up with car chases and fantastical storytelling. On the face of it, the rise and fall of Research in Motion's keyboard-equipped smartphone may not seem inherently compelling. But the brilliance of the film — directed by Matt Johnson, who also co-wrote it with Matthew Miller — is that it makes the BlackBerry's journey feel like a genuine tragedy.

skyyler• 3 years ago

I'm excited to have some time to watch this. Johnson's previous work The Dirties was surprisingly great. Hugely recommended to anyone that enjoys metafiction.

initplus2• 3 years ago

The tv series he go-directed “Nirvana the Band the Show” was also quite funny.

zooch• 3 years ago

Came here to mention Nirvana the Band the Show. One of my absolute favourites and I recommend it to everyone.

Blackberry was good as well - don't expect the exact facts, it says right in the beginning it is a fictionalization.

mjmsmith• 3 years ago

Operation Avalanche too.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-operat...

silisili3• 3 years ago

And it arrived just as 3G networks were rolling out, which gave carriers more of an incentive to charge customers for data instead of cellular minutes.

Rather sloppy rewriting of history or connecting of dots, as the original iPhone notoriously did not support 3G.

orf• 3 years ago

They didn’t say it did?

silisili3• 3 years ago

It's a weird connection to make. 3G is rolling out for much faster data, so carriers can start charging data. This makes it sound like a marketing play by carriers to push it. But why would they push a device using the much slower EDGE? There were plenty of 3G phones out at the time if that were the angle.

CharlesW• 3 years ago

They're talking about the timing, which is notable because carriers were trying to (1) mainstream mobile data use and (2) generate excitement about the possibilities of 3G, which was just rolling out in the U.S. in 2007.

"[AT&T Mobility president and CEO Ralph de la Vega] also called Apple's iPhone "a game-changer," noting that since AT&T exclusively launched the device in mid-2007, mobile data consumption has grown dramatically." https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/at-t-13-subs-own-a-3...

robertlagrant2• 3 years ago

My mind was blown when Blackberry allowed WhatsApp on their devices. BBM was so sticky to so many people that if they hadn't had WhatsApp to transition to other devices to, I think Blackberry would still be alive and kicking today.

mdon• 3 years ago

WhatsApp blackberry developer here (2010-eol). We were pretty sure they wouldn’t let us into their store if we had started later, but they left us in since we were already there starting in 2009.

We did start to hit push service quotas. They quota by the app, not per user with the app. So we had a quota of 5 million pushes per day. Asked for more. Denied. We found some creative alternatives. PIN messaging was a surprisingly open API. So we ended up having currently connected devices send a PIN message to devices we want to bring online. The recipient device would delete the message to cut down on noise.

jeffbee2• 3 years ago

RIM was already completely fucked before WhatsApp was even invented. I went to a BlackBerry developer conference in San Jose a year after the iPhone was released and it was like a lynch mob. They were pissed that Apple's APIs were so good. Nobody wanted to develop apps for BlackBerry and these were the attendees at the BlackBerry developer conference!

nvy3• 3 years ago

Yes, I naively wrote RIM an email about the ease of onboarding developers on Android and iOS, compared to the hurdles that needed hurdling on Blackberry OS, even before "BB10".

Somebody senior in Engineering actually responded, to their credit, but the response was basically "because security, which is why we're the #1 platform".

Aged like milk.

robertlagrant2• 3 years ago

Maybe, but just watching how people were totally locked into BBM as how they conducted their lives... it was huge.

noarchy• 3 years ago

BlackBerry eventually relented to such an extent that they developed BBM for Android and iOS. And while it did gain some traction early on in select places, it was way too late to prevent the ship from sinking.

hackernewds• 3 years ago

Is this why Apple is resistant to RCS and USB-C?

MrOwnPut2• 3 years ago

Contrary to the tone of the article, this is an obligatory reminder that the BlackBerry movie is heavily fictionalized:

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/dennis-kavelman-i-was-a-lon...

sbarre• 3 years ago

Yeah I know a few people who worked at RIM back in the day, and they're all pretty much in full agreement with this op ed.

babyshake• 3 years ago

So is The Social Network, but I still think despite that it gets at some important truths about tech culture.

MrOwnPut2• 3 years ago

Such as?

MatthiasWandel• 3 years ago

The first half of the movie mixes a lot of stuff up date and time wise, and adds a bunch of completely fictional sub-plots. I worked at RIM from 1993 to 2007

Apocryphon4• 3 years ago

Hopefully it will give Glenn Howerton (Dennis from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) the Oscar mod.

calyth2018• 3 years ago

Engadget had been quite biased against BlackBerry for a long long time.

"Crucially, though, it's not just like reading a Wikipedia entry. Johnson tells us exactly who Laziridis and Balsillie are from the very first scenes of the movie."

This statement's patently false. Aside from failing to spell the name of one of the main characters correctly, anyone who have interacted with the real Mike Lazaridis knows that he's not a meek push-over of a computer nerd.

All the review, this one included, that raves about how true and accurate the movie have never been there.

And the movie would have been better off if they just used false names, because at least it would be a lot less distracting from all the wild deviations from reality.

throw0101b• 3 years ago

The movie is based on the book Losing the Signal by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, which is probably closer to the actual history:

* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25602451

Recent interview with Silcoff on the topic:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TkQCMHb3Qo&t=49m56s

rchaud• 3 years ago

The original book is fantastic, the HN crowd would enjoy the details provided. It's a very engaging read, on par with books like Masters of Doom.

anyfactor2• 3 years ago

I just finished watching Matthias Wandel's take on the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_w7T3JMXk4

He was featured quite prominently in the book, and he even consulted on the movie. Can't wait to see his movie review video.

arecurrence• 3 years ago

This movie is scoring well with 98% on rotten tomatoes and 7.9 on imdb. I loved it and while it's almost entirely a fictional work (in particular, none of the characters are even remotely similar to the people that led RIM)... it really hits on the feeling of a fast scaling startup challenging incumbents with innovative hardware.

1. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blackberry 2. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21867434/

cheschire• 3 years ago

Coincidentally, Glenn Howerton's highest and lowest rated movies[0] on RT were released on the same day even though Charlie Day's movie was in the works for several years[1].

0: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/glenn_howerton

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed0ZhILQs6s

ge964• 3 years ago

I like these shows/movies that chase something like:

- Jobs (2013)

- social network

- halt and catch fire

- silicon valley

- the internship

- Tetris

there's more can't think of right now

I'm looking forward to seeing this when it streams

mhh__• 3 years ago

Margin Call?

foobarbecue• 3 years ago

Flash of Genius!

Apocryphon4• 3 years ago

Pirates of Silicon Valley is the O.G.

ramraj07• 3 years ago

One of these is not like the others - social network is barely, barely about tech. Just a really good character study of a fictional person if you ask me. Back when it came we thought it showed a version of Mark that was maybe shittier. Turns out social network mark is 100x a better person than what the real one became.

weeblewobble• 3 years ago

Moneyball has a little bit of this. Not sure how I feel about it cohesively but it has some excellent “people talking in conference rooms” scenes

somat2• 3 years ago

I had a blackberry passport. I bought it when I heard that blackberry was getting out of the phone OS business, So a terrible reason to buy one, but I have always been a fan of QNX and after this I would never get a chance to see what a qnx phone could be. My thoughts.

That keyboard, oh man that keyboard was very very good, I am on a full touchscreen phone currently and I curse that stupid virtual keyboard every time I have to use it. with a double curse if I have to use it while in a car.

There was not much left of qnx for the user to interact with, sort of like whatever is left of linux in android phones, kind of a hollow shell. however I did like the UI. it is hard to quantify but it felt better designed to be used, a tool. Android by comparison feels more like it was designed to look pretty with usability as a second class citizen. but really it is a minor thing.

I suspect the real advantage of having qnx as a real time os was how responsive it was, not fast, but always responsive, never any lag. but that may just be my imagination.

Edit: I just remembered the square screen, I love the square screen, and it took square pictures, what a great phone.

w-ll2• 3 years ago

This is why I really miss the Original Motorola Droids. The full slide keyboard and a ssh terminal was incomparable to anything we have today.

Its on the list of things that I guess me and like 12 other people care about. But I would probably go back to Android if someone made a similar phone.

nradov• 3 years ago

Some of the early Samsung Android phones also had excellent slide-out keyboards. Would love to have one again but that form factor is probably dead. Device manufacturers want to sell the same few SKUs worldwide instead of producing a hundred different variants of hardware keyboard layouts.

schrectacular2• 3 years ago

That was my first real smartphone.i loved it. Still miss it two. If you find the other 11 let's have a LAN party or sth.

schrectacular2• 3 years ago

That was my first real smartphone. I loved it. Still miss the flip down tactile keyboard. If you find the other 11 people let's have a LAN party or something.

nvy3• 3 years ago

Yep, I still have my Passport in a drawer somewhere. The keyboard is -sensitive, which means you can swipe on it to scroll. Awesome device.

nvy3• 3 years ago

The keyboard is -sensitive

s/-sensitive/touch-sensitive

See, on a blackberry I would never have had that problem.

CosmicShadow• 3 years ago

It was and still is the coolest device, holding it sideways and scrolling with your thumb, it was so light and perfectly sized, the battery lasted for DAYS. I really want another phone like it, but everything now is the same, except for the foldables, which intrigue me just because I want something different and new. It's too bad the bigger ones are so expensive.

ano88888• 3 years ago

most people spent the majority of their time viewing the content not typing so that's why our screens get bigger and bigger.

6510• 3 years ago

This is the design goal, it's working great for the status quo, everything you say is hard then burned eventually.

fzeindl• 3 years ago

Android by comparison feels more like it was designed to look pretty with usability as a second class citizen.

I do think that this comes from the code base not being very good. The base layout and view classes have hundreds of thousand lines of codes, the layout algorithm is quadratic to the number of views. It was originally designed for digital cameras, not for phones. The base classes use many bit fields as well instead of enums, they don't look like Java.

Plus the strange back button concept which comes from the camera.

All this means developers waste a lot of time wrestling the framework.

lostmsu5• 3 years ago

What's strange about the back button? It is one of the things that makes me not consider Apple devices since they lack it.

pjmlp3• 3 years ago

It has improved over time, however it is clearly Java written by C++ developers, like we were doing back in 1996.

grumpyprole• 3 years ago

There used to be lots of issues with rotating the screen, many apps would lose UI state almost as if everything was torn down and rebuilt. Never looked at the code but guessed it was never designed to be an iPhone.

serial_dev2• 3 years ago

For what it's worth, I like the on screen keyboards.

I use four languages on a daily basis (English, German, Spanish and Hungarian), and SwiftKey helps me with that without having to worry about changing layouts.

It gets better over time and after I fed it my emails (yay privacy), I barely find cases where it doesn't know a word I want to use. I can also type with a swipe which works pretty well and lets me type relatively fast.

kqr• 3 years ago

My Android phone is a BlackBerry Key2 and I've loved it for the almost five years I've had it now. I have trouble living without a physical keyboard on the device and I lament the fact that I may have to carry a touchscreen-only phone for work in the near future. I don't want to carry two, but I may end up doing that anyway.

The Key2 is easily the best smartphone I have had, beating even the Nokia N900 due to reliability (i did not get five solid years out of that) and compatibility with mainstream (read: Android) apps.

(Compatibility is not perfect, though. You may think android is android but the screen of the Key2 is a few pixels shorter than the common ones, so some apps have buttons that are always rendered outside the screen. Also some apps seem to do some sort of vendor check against a whitelist that does not contain this model.)

Gys• 3 years ago

with a double curse if I have to use it while in a car

Are you really complaining a virtual keyboard is terrible to use WHILE DRIVING?!

halgir• 3 years ago

I think (hope) they mean as a passenger. The various bumps and turns are likelier to throw off your aim on a virtual keyboard compared to a proper tactile keyboard.

somat2• 3 years ago

heh, No as a passenger. but I will say if a car has a touchscreen as a primary control device. not only are those miserable to use while driving, they should probably not be used while driving for the same reason you don't want to be using your phone while driving. if you are lucky it will have large fixed predictable (virtual)buttons. however even then it usually requires visually fixing your hand to the keyboard and there is no way to touch it without activating it. this is what makes it miserable to use in a vehicle. what would help(a little, not much) is a big bar to rest your hand on. See also: why touch controls are terrible in a vehicle.

fragile_frogs• 3 years ago

I bought the BlackBerry Classic a while ago and I also own the Key 2.

The BB Classic is everything I want in a smartphone, the build quality is great, the keyboard is amazing in and BB OS is really intuitive and fluid to use.

Such a shame that every smartphone nowadays is just a rectangle with a screen and nothing else...

pavelstoev2• 3 years ago

I worked at RIM/BlackBerry in 2005-06. It was my first engineering job. I was in my early 20’s and at some point, way before iPhone, I went to my manager and suggested we should add a camera and some multimedia features to the device, because that’s what the younger people wanted and used. He said - but why, BlackBerry is all about serving the business people market. We argued. Turns out we were both right and wrong…

jeffbee2• 3 years ago

The 8100 was released in 2006 with its camera. I am sure it was in development for quite a while prior. That phones would all have cameras was a foregone conclusion by 2005.

fredoralive• 3 years ago

Although only getting camera support in 2006 was rather late, and I wish I could find a good contemporary source for the Mike Lazaridis quote circa 2003 that "Cameraphones will be rejected by corporate users." (and thus Blackberrys won't have cameras, as their customers are companies, not end uses) from a couple of years earlier[1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jun/29/rim-chief... is an example of a second hand non-contemporary one. Although I did dig up https://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/it-s-small-addictiv... from 2004 which does at least have the fun quote "If you think about web browsing, shopping or banking services, how many of those are compelling enough to want to do from a phone?".

anyfactor2• 3 years ago

Did you know Matthias Wandel[0]?

I used to watch his YouTube videos all the time. And he used to talk about his days in RIM as he was one of the first engineer there. You reminded me to check his channel again and looks like he did a reaction video to the trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_w7T3JMXk4

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel

pavelstoev2• 3 years ago

Unfortunately I did not know him but I will surely follow now :)

osigurdson• 3 years ago

The ABC’s of business declined: arrogance, bureaucracy and complacency. It sounds like at least one of those were at play at RIM

pjmlp3• 3 years ago

Similar experience on the internal shows at Nokia, when several of us tried to suggest Maemo should have a radio antenna instead of just wlan.

senko• 3 years ago

Rumor I heard at the time was Symbian "owned" GSM and was golden goose and wasn't about to let another project encroach on it.

Ie political, not technical or even strategic, decision.

WhereIsTheTruth• 3 years ago

They should have tried the laptop market as well, I loved their phones..

There are rumors about Elon Musk's team wanting to buy RIM to revive the BlackBerry legacy (with the current weather of the geopolitics, it's IMO very well positioned for a comeback), leveraging Starlink would be interesting to see..

Who remember when last year he mentioned he'd make his own phone to go after Apple (appstore drama)? ;)

Apple has no competition, Microsoft tried and flopped, BlackBerry is imo the only one able to compete

pcurve• 3 years ago

That's one of the more enjoyable trailers I've seen.

Lorin• 3 years ago

Meanwhile all the patents were sold to a nameless holding company so we'll never see a reasonable mobile keyboard attachment for phones until they expire.

no_wizard• 3 years ago

RIM could have had a second act, potentially, by being SMS 2.0 (as mentioned in this article[0] they tried to sell BBM to carriers as SMS 2.0), and I'm not sure how they lost out on this, as Google did this with RCS many years later. I think if they had done it, it would have forced better interop with Apple (iMessage was still newish and they may have been in a situation to be further pressured longer to support standard communication protocols).

There was a longform article about RIM's attempt to become the "BBM" company but I can't for the life of me find it, it was by a major tech publication (The Verge I think, but I tried searching their archives and no dice)

[0] https://www.inverse.com/tech/how-blackberry-bbm-changed-mess...

kiratp• 3 years ago

I was at Windows Phone (WP7/8 days) when “RCS was just a couple of years away”. Good thing I didn’t hold my breath - it didn’t seem to me then that there was any path to success and I was on my first job as a 20 year old.

Google hasn’t managed anything with RCS other than deploy it for their own messaging app that talks to their own infrastructure. The fact that the app uses RCS is an implementation detail - could just as well be carrier pigeons. Doesn’t matter because it isn’t cross-carrier interoperable.

The carriers all moved from Circuit Switched SMS signaling to SMS over IMS (LTE onwards) for interoperable SMS. IMS is the layer under RCS (created originally for cable set top boxes - go figure).

This is basically SMS over IP which means your device is doing all the legacy stuff like 7bit ASCII encoding to pack messages into 160 characters etc. These requirements won’t go away because, the moment a carrier tries to do cross-carrier interop there is a whole sea of legacy translations that would have to be managed by the message originating carrier. This would require real-time figuring out the capabilities of a receiving carrier based on phone number homing. It’s a massive undertaking that’s $$$.

On top of this The carriers all fought including E2EE in the spec to avoid picking a fight with the government. So anything Google implemented is DOA.

RCS has failed.

initplus2• 3 years ago

The reason iMessage has been successful (and RCS has not) is because iMessage doesn't have any reliance on the carrier. Selling a messaging system to carriers doesn't make any sense, why cooperate with them when it's easier to route around them and handle all the messages through your own infra.

msh3• 3 years ago

I dont think that they had the reach to be SMS 2.0, Blackberry was only a major player in a few markets outside north america.

muppetman• 3 years ago

Is this the article?

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-insid...

netaustin• 3 years ago

I have a lot of Blackberry nostalgia; I was 23 in NYC, 2007ish, and my work-issued BB Curve (later a Bold) plus my personal original iPhone were a combination that I was so happy with. The Blackberry could tether to my early MacBook pro in the remotest of locations, and I could easily SSH into the (real) servers I ran. Never used BBM but played Bricks for hours and hours. I wasn’t nearly as satisfied with an iPhone-only solution until 2017 or so.

pavlov• 3 years ago

For a fun dramatized look at mobile innovation a decade earlier, I can recommend the recent mini-series “Mobile 101” (also known as “Made in Finland”):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_101

It follows a group of Nokia engineers and managers through 1988-90 as the company tries to shed its conglomerate roots, is sued by Motorola for patent infringement, and one engineer secretly keeps alive his pet project to develop the world’s smallest mobile phone (an unimaginably light 275 g!)

I particularly enjoyed the contrast when the slick American lawyers from Motorola come to take depositions from Nokia engineers in the small depressing Finnish town where Nokia used to have its phone manufacturing operations.

v-erne• 3 years ago

BlackBerry - that brings back some memories. 8700 was my first real smartphone - I got it on one of my first work projects because I was tasked to create mobile client for some CRM.

I distinctly remeber that the UI API was quite complicated and took me weeks to get satisfactory results.

And the IDE and simulator from RIM were so annoyingly slow that I was very close to never touching Java again.

But, I must admit that the hardware itself was quite impressive and nice to use. And it somehow allowed me to have unlimited mobile internet access 15 years before it become norm here in Poland (well almost - there are still transfer limits).

sourcecodeplz• 3 years ago

That keyboard was amazing. Such a joy and very satisfying to use.

theflyingpigeon• 3 years ago

I miss my BlackBerry. I had a Pearl Flip, it was the most beautiful thing ever.

All these boring phones, especially the iPhone, don’t come even close.

Edit: added “flip”. The touch keyboard is a disgrace.

'BlackBerry' review: The comedy and tragedy of the innovator's dilemma

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