So BlackBerry announced last Monday that its board has put together a special committee to "explore strategic alternatives," which is corporate-speak for "we might sell the whole company, or take it private, or find someone to merge with, we genuinely don't know yet." Prem Watsa, the Fairfax Financial guy who's been on their board and is their biggest outside shareholder, stepped down from the committee because of the obvious conflict of interest. Stock popped a little on the news and then everyone went back to writing the same paragraph about how BlackBerry used to matter.
I'm typing part of this post on a BlackBerry Bold 9900. Work issued it to me in early 2011 and nobody has ever taken it back, so it just lives in my bag next to my actual phone like some kind of legacy system nobody wants to decommission. The keyboard is still, genuinely, the best keyboard I have ever typed on with my thumbs. I can bang out a two-paragraph email at a stoplight without looking down, which is not a thing I'm proud of admitting but its true. The little notification light blinks amber for BBM and I still feel a tiny dumb flicker of Pavlovian excitement every time, even though basically nobody I know still uses BBM.
Anyway. None of that matters to the market, obviously. What's actually happening is that BlackBerry bet the company on the Z10 back in January, an all-touchscreen phone with a UI (BlackBerry 10) that a lot of reviewers genuinely liked, and it just didn't sell. Carriers didn't push it, the app situation was thin at launch, and by the time the Q10 came out in the spring with a physical keyboard bolted onto BB10, the narrative had already calcified. I went and played with a Q10 at a Rogers store a few weeks back (I've got family in Toronto, don't ask) and it's a genuinely nice piece of hardware. Doesn't matter. Perception beat product a long time ago here.
What gets me is how fast this all happened. Five years ago RIM (they only renamed to BlackBerry this past January, which still trips me up when I type it) had something like half the US smartphone market in the corporate/enterprise world. Every lawyer, every banker, every IT department had a BES server humming away somewhere keeping thousands of these things synced. Now the story is a special committee and a stock that's down around 40% for the year. Nokia's in a similar spot honestly, though at least they've got Microsoft's money holding them up (allegedly, we'll see how long that lasts).
I don't think a sale actually fixes the underlying problem, for what its worth, since nobody's said what the underlying problem even is that a new owner would solve. Is it the OS? The hardware? The fact that iOS and Android just got a two year head start on an app ecosystem that's basically impossible to catch up to at this point? A buyer doesn't hand you developer mindshare. You can't acquire your way into people wanting to build for your platform.
Small unrelated complaint while I've got this window open: I bought one of the little Chromecast dongles a couple weeks back for thirty five bucks, mostly out of curiosity, and spent forty five minutes fighting with my apartment's wifi before it would even show up in the setup app. Works fine now, streams Netflix from my laptop onto the TV without me having to do the HDMI-cable-across-the-living-room thing, but the first-run experience was rough enough that I can't imagine my mom getting through it without calling me twice.
Back to BlackBerry though. I keep the Bold charged on my desk out of what I can only describe as loyalty to a piece of plastic and metal, which is a weird thing to feel loyalty toward. I don't know what happens to it if the company gets bought and BES support quietly winds down over the next year or two. Probably it just stops getting security updates and sits in a drawer, same as every other phone eventually does. I'll be sad about it in a way that's completely out of proportion to what the device actually does, which is send email slightly better than my other phone does.