meursault

You’re operating with massive hindsight bias here. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion in 2007 that iOS and Android were going to win. BlackBerry (and indeed many of the players you listed) had a chance to compete and they simply didn’t. Also I’m not sure where you got the idea that BlackBerry didn’t have a vertically integrated supply chain. They absolutely did. I worked there in the mid-2000s and the hardware was manufactured literally down the street from where the OS and apps were built.

This is 100% the reason. I watched BlackBerry fail from the inside and there’s always been an extremely vocal minority of former BB users who want to go back to a physical keyboard. This is a niche product for that audience at best, it will never have mass market appeal as a primary device. I don’t think it will have mass market appeal as a secondary device for the same reasons as others have pointed out in this thread either, but I respect them shooting their shot I guess.

MacOS is a brand that Apple owns, so that makes sense? It’s like saying in the market of Tesla cars there is only one manufacturer.

My mind immediately went to surveying the participants in a Skinner box on their perceived well being. It would be incredible if people DIDN'T self-report feeling great after pulling the dopamine levers

Any "competitive advantage" gained by these points will be more than wiped out by the extreme difficulty companies will have attracting talent if they don't offer remote flexibility. All of the data I've seen so far is pretty clear that yours is a minority opinion among tech workers.

Have you tried the recently added container support? There's a component provided called the Lambda Runtime Interface Emulator that exposes an API for the locally running container. In my experience this is miles better than the original approach.

This sounds interesting. Would you consider Unreal rather than Unity?

I eventually found it by searching "burner phone". Fyi, your iTunes link on the site is broken for me, giving a generic "can't connect to iTunes Store". Thanks :)

Awesome idea. You don't seem to be listed in non-US app stores (Canada, in my case). Any plans to be available internationally, or at least in the same countries served by Twilio?

great idea. this is actually how my wife and i met. no joke. i had just ended a long relationship and changed my status on facebook. she noticed and started messaging me.

Love the idea. Chore tracking would be a really cool feature I think.

My favorite:

"Don't jam your computer -- download this screen saver, and never again will you need to suffer the indignity of burnt phospor."

That's some truly awful copy.

At the risk of sounding trolly -- I hope the next big thing, US origin or not, will be able to handle more traffic than whatever this is.

If you like hacking in Lua, I've been enjoying Luna. It's a little IDE with an embedded Lua interpreter. The interface is weird but it works.

Doesn't bypassing the SQL parser kind of make this a NOSQL solution?

Sure, it's volatile. But do you think Justin Bieber chose BlackBerry because he wants one, or because he got a huge paycheck to use it? Product placement does not end at television and movies.

The Bieber effect is an important point. I think RIM realized that they don't need bleeding edge tech to stay competitive. That's how you sell to people like Bob Lefsetz and David Pogue, but those guys aren't even close to representative of the largest segment of the consumer smartphone market. The way to sell to the everyday smartphone user? Influence. Product placement, both in media and the real world (i.e. putting new units in the hands of celebrities), is an extremely powerful trick. I think it's worked, and will continue to work, very well for RIM. Think about BlackBerry as a brand. Take the wealthiest and most powerful people in America: CEO's, celebrities, politicians. Mostly BlackBerry users. Hell, they even got Obama using one. They've married the ideas of affluence and power to their brand. Sure, those of us who care about innovation and moving tech forward want them to do something groundbreaking like they did with mobile email, but isn't it cheaper to just comp a 15 year old popstar a phone and watch the money roll in? The market rewards big companies with well-marketed mediocrity, so that's what we get. I mean shit, just look at Microsoft.