Blackberry's collapse was one of their own doing and they deserved it the way they treated the market they had.
Spent the first year "we don't have to worry about Apple, we're #1 so obviously people like us better"
Spent the next year "ok, people are starting to buy that other device, lets make a copy" and released cheap and bad copies (Storm and Storm 2)
then finally came to their senses that they needed to design something new and do it right, but went about it like morons. They decided to tell all their customers "We're building the best new phone! it'll be out in 2 years, in the meantime, buy these devices that will be replaced in 2 years and not be compatible at all!".
what do you think happened? Those of us who were in Blackberry eco-system noped out. I'm not spending $500 on a device today that will completely lose all support app development and forward momentum just ot have to rebuy a device and all apps all over again in 2 year?.
this exodus from Blackberry was it's undoing. it took 2 new CEO's before they finally got someone who understood business and kept blackberry alive.
I think one of the fears with Apple right now is that we see this similar "We're #1, so we're obviously the best" mentality from Apple's leadership.
and while most of the products Apple is releasing are great products. Excellent quality, and offered fantastic services. There's always the fear that complacency could lead to someone else coming up with some new disruptive tech that dethrones Apple. (honestly, not sure why people are afraid of this, economics isn't a zero sum game, not being #1 doesn't mean you're bad. you can have legit competition)
while there's no way to say that Apple WILL repeat blackberries mistake, ignoring history is often the best way of repeating it.
yes, they very much did. and did some things extremely well, long before anyone else did. sure, their devices had issues (like needing daily battery pulls) due to a buggy OS. But we're talking early EARLY smartphone days here, the bugs were worth it compared to the feature phones blackberry was replacing.
but the Blackberry devices had an "App store". though it was in the day when you needed to download and have your phone plugged into your computer, similar to early iTunes requirements. THey did eventually also get a music service (streaming services really didn't exist back then either).
They had some of the earliest "Digital assistant" softwares available. Almost all Blackberry devices had a physical "action" button. And you could often download a voice control app and bind it to it. this was back before "machine learning" and "AI", so while the functionality was limited to remote controlling music, or sending emails, it was absolutely early day voice assistant.
Don't know about mobile payments. NFC hadn't been invented yet (or at least available), the popularity of mobile payments only came about after BBRY's demise, so bringing this into the conversation is disingenuous. "HOW DARE THEY NOT HAVE TECH THAT WASN'T INVENTED YET!"
And shortly after the iPad's release, Blackberry did have it's own lineup of Tablets that integrated with their phones. Blackberry PLaybook (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_PlayBook). While it was a whopping commercial failure, the device itself was actually really good. I still have mine and it STILL runs very well (just has nothing new to run). But it integrated very well with Blackberry services and ecosystem, even featuring receiving your phones notifications on the tablet, and direct access to your phones email, sms and BBM so that your phone and tablet always had the same up to date data and notifications.
and it integrated fantastically with the business ecosystem through their robust blackberry back end cloud based network infrastructure where all communications went through BBS allowing direct connection to exchange servers and other messaging services, very very much like what everyone else is doing today. You have to remember, Blackberry basically invented push notification
TL
R versionsof all this:
don't make excuses to ignore history. while all might not be equal, ignoring history often means you miss lessons it has to teach. And judging from your comments about Blackberry that were factually wrong, it shows you don't understand the history itself.
Blackberry should absolutely be a cautionary tale to every single business who thinks themselves #1. there is always someone nipping at your heals. Being number 1 today doesn't guarantee number 1 tomorrow. And disruptive tech can always topple even the biggest giants who are caught unaware.
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RIP Blackberry. I know, I know, they're still technically around, but, they're a husk of what they were a decade ago
design division something fierce.