How they did messaging experience so solid and complete so early? I never used blackberry as a user, but only developed some small compatible j2me apps for the platform in the early 2000s. But I was impressed with UI and overall service completeness.
The main problem is that back then, messaging services were just that - messaging services designed to keep people in touch. They were open, or at least neutral to third-parties interoperating with them.
The problem is that doesn't pay the bills, or at least not as much as "growth and engagement" and stalking/non-consensual data collection does. So they started restricting interoperability with technical and legal means (somehow copyright is often used to prevent third-party clients for displaying content despite the user having a "license" to access said content and despite the original rights-holder - the sender of said content - having no problems with this).
There's no technical reason why a unified messaging client can't be done, neither now nor a decade ago and in fact it was a mostly solved problem a decade ago before the "growth and engagement" crowd came around.
The key to it was having everything go through their servers, to their client app on the phone. The problem is that more messaging apps came to prominence (WhatsApp, Slack, arguably instagram and snapchat, etc), they wanted to own their UX and didn't want messages coming through their service to get munged together into a generic feed through someone else's servers and into someone else's client app.
I would dispute that. BB was perfectly aware of the changing market, and it did all-touchscreen devices and things. It also did BBM for Android.
But I don't think the company realised how much smartphones were surpassing them, so they were very late to move to a smartphone platform. When they did, it was to QNX – the basis of BB10 – and it was a very good OS, but it was too late.
It reminds me of Palm and PalmOS. When it became clear that they needed to move to ARM, they talked to Symbian about using it as the basis of the new ARM PalmOS. That would have been a killer platform – but they didn't do it.
The company decided against an absolutely superb option which would have given them a major technological advantage.
Instead, the replaced their bought-in 68K kernel Kadak AMX, which actually did multitasking but Palm didn't pay for that option (!) – with their own emulator thing, MCK, meaning that ARM PalmOS (PalmOS 5 "Garnet") was still single-tasking with almost no multimedia support.
Then PalmSource bought the remnants of Be, using it to make PalmOS 6, "Cobalt".
I read a lot about Cobalt and it looked amazing for 2003-2004. But nobody shipped phones with it – not even Palm itself. Instead, they... licensed Windows CE.
A second disastrously bad decision. Few companies survive their first, but Palm did it and survived long enough to do it again.
