So BlackBerry's board announced this week that they're forming a "special committee" to look at "strategic alternatives," which is corporate-speak for we are trying to sell the company or at least find someone else to make this problem go away. Stock jumped a bit Monday on the news and then kept doing its slow leak the rest of the week. I read the Reuters piece on my lunch break and just sort of sat there for a second, because I still have a company BlackBerry in my bag right now. Its a Bold, black, the keys are worn shiny on the O and the E from how much I type on it, and it is sitting six inches from my elbow as I write this.
I know, I know. Everyone who finds out I still carry one does the same face. Its somewhere between pity and confusion, like Id told them I still use a fax machine. And look, I get it, the Z10 came out earlier this year and basically nobody bought it, BB10 was supposed to be the big relaunch and it landed with a thud, Thorsten Heins has spent a year and a half promising a turnaround thats never quite turned. But the physical keyboard is genuinely the best thing about the phone and Ill die on that hill. I can write a coherent email at a stoplight without looking at the screen. Try that on a glass keyboard sometime, autocorrect will make you say things you never meant to say to your boss.
The IT department at my office issues these because of the security stuff, the whole BES server thing, and honestly thats the actual reason BlackBerry still exists at all right now — enterprise contracts, not people choosing it in a store. Which is sort of the saddest part of the whole story. This was the phone that invented the category. Everybody I knew in 2008 had one clipped to their belt, thumbs going a mile a minute, and now the company that made it is basically asking to be bought so somebody can strip it for parts or fold it into a bigger portfolio nobody will remember exists in five years.
Anyway. Not really here to write BlackBerry's obituary, plenty of people already doing that this week and Im sure plenty more will be doing it for months. What actually got me thinking about all this was a much smaller and dumber thing that happened the same day.
I finally got my Chromecast in the mail.
Ordered the thing back at the very end of July, the day after Google announced it, thirty five bucks, seemed like a no brainer. Then of course it sold out immediately because they'd bundled three free months of Netflix with it and half the internet ordered one that afternoon. So it sat in shipping limbo for something like three weeks while I kept checking the tracking page like a crazy person. Got it Tuesday, plugged it into the HDMI port behind my TV, had it working off my phone in maybe four minutes total, no remote, no menu diving. Watched twenty minutes of something dumb on Netflix just to prove to myself it worked and then didnt touch it again for two days because, weirdly, once a gadget works its almost less interesting than when youre still setting it up.
Its a strange contrast to sit with though. One end of the room, a company thats been making phones since before the iPhone existed, essentially raising a white flag. Other end of the room, a thirty five dollar dongle from a search company that basically solves the "get stuff from my phone onto my TV" problem better than three or four expensive gadgets tried to before it, and does it by doing almost nothing itself, just relaying a stream. Doesnt even have its own remote or interface really, your phone is the remote. Thats sort of the whole design philosophy in one object.
I dont have some grand theory connecting these two things beyond "this was a weird week for gadgets on my desk." The Bold is going in a drawer eventually, I know that, probably sooner than later given how this week went. But not today. Today Im still typing emails on a keyboard with a worn-out O, and I dont especially feel like defending that choice to anyone at the coffee machine tomorrow, but Ill probably end up doing it anyway.