5 things blackberry needs to do to be relevant again
The blackberry story is one of self invention, but a failed one. A legendary giant once, now a dimming star, a cheap stock that no one wants, but this year so far has seen 34% rise in value, a phone that is not relevant any more, yet on the other hand, it's coming back, again, and again, and again, more orders, fewer orders; each time distinctively with a refreshed attempt to renew itself, but each time, in spite of the opportunities, somehow ending up with exactly the wrong strategy for the ever changing time.
From my humble observations there are a few things that Blackberry could do now, not so far as to go back to its glorious days but lead the company to a new place in this increasingly interesting global arena of technology.
1 The key board.
Once I met a person who can blindly type whatever he wants on the Iphone under the table without looking at the screen (great skill btw). The rest of humanity however have to rely on a physical, tangible keyboard to achieve that confidently. The great Blackberry keyboard everyone tried to imitate once upon a time had long been abandoned since IPHONE tookover the throne. The virtual, and super-flat, has become the status-quo and even BB itself jumped the ship.
Not so fast.
As beautiful as the new aesthetic standard is, graphics is easily copiable, and there are only a certain amount of super flatness graphics any sane brain can absorb in a day. At its heart, the school of simplicity isolate sensuous experiences in its cluttered individuality, preventing a compound reading of the whole lot of materiality, which is partially why it is so beautify. Humanity however, has its limits of the virtual porn, and instead the physical, tangible, actual shit, is not merely a token of nostalgia but actually something that is demanded, needed. The keyboard has to stay.
That is not to say there aren't things one can do to change the existing design. The way that the physical keyboard integrates and interacts with the virtual operating system, too, could certainly be an area of further exploration. Don't ever stop developing the physical, one can have the prettiest face but still need the abs and quads to do some proper action.
2 Apps.
Everyone assumes that a phone should be able to accommodate every kind of apps out there and be completely open. That's why BB fell out of favor when Android and Apple came. But today this open platform concept is decidedly not true, to the point that it's actually irrelevant. Think about all the fashionable gadgets out there, the Pebble, Google Glass, fitbit, which can even expand to the likes of Playstation and Xbox, the softwares, "APPs", are, increasingly, gadget specific, or at the very least, reconfigured from their generic forms to suit physicality of the hardware.
Think about it, in spite of its open platform, the most popular apps on Pebble are either a watch face, or some sort of information indicator (message alerts, reminders, weather, calorie burnt, etc, etc), because the physical existence of the watch limits the kind of apps that are applicable and appropriate for it. It's incidentally not a bad thing, as without limitations of format and some kind of shell, technology tend to be abused in an untasteful way.
If Blackberry is wise enough to stick to its old physical keyboard, then the next problem or opportunity for them, really, is not how to maximize the physical size of the screen, or how to catch up with the Android phones in terms of hugging every single app and wants to hug back, but rather to consider the BB keyboard as a platform on which Apps must be built. How many gadgets on this world have the whole physical keyboard on them still, that's like a whole 30 buttons more than any phone out there?
3 Be dangerous, be tricky.
Is it a safe assumption that, the user of blackberry is almost always evil? Not evil in the exclusive sense that he or she is constantly plotting to start a war or overthrow a government, but evil in the general sense that he or she is addicted to strategic thinking, to over analysis, to efficiency, in communicating with his or her allies to fend of aggression or initiate some ambitious expansion.
It's not necessarily a matter of fact, but of impression, or expectation, that the Blackberry user prides oneself as the smart person in the room.
You don't provide Angry Birds for this kind of people, which is why BB lost ground in the first place, trying to provide "entertainment" to the wrong crowd and not doing it nearly as nicely as its big screen competitors. The real mission is to provide something for the evil people what Angry Birds is for kids, what clash of clans is for bored high school students, and what snapchat is for people who want to snapchat.
Develop specific games and apps, buy them, steal them, copy from someone, doesn't matter, but up the fking intelligence level, scratch the ego of the person, tailor your content to your customer. In total, you need about 10 really good apps, 50 decently intriguing apps, 3-5 platforms and 20 dirty weird guilty pleasures to be a complete eco system. The task needs a huge amount of resources, but the thing is they don't need to do it themselves. Go collaborate.
4 Be the gateway for something, one thing.
Once upon a time BB stands for the channel for proper communication, period. That boat's long sailed. Blackberry needs to think about something else.
One of the possibilities is the idea of a concierge, sort of like Vertu and Amex but geared more towards an app based dedication, and it can be more abstract. Instead of developing a personal assistant service from scratch that people not likely to adopt, consider BB an editor, so that every app that's put up in the BB system somehow has a service based attitude in its blood. For example, whereas it is totally reasonable to allow FB to run its app on BB, work on a collaboration with LinkedIn with features of FB and Snapchat, which can totally be utilized in the world of the evil people. At the beginning big names may be reluctant to change their ways of doing things to just satisfy a dying phone platform, but if done correctly, this exclusion can be grown into an exclusiveness that everyone wants a piece of.
One area that BB does need to up their game is social media. Hardware wise that means fixing their horrible horrible camera, and software wise their whole software interface and directory catalogue in which no one can find anything. App and platform? Blackberry has forgotten that they almost singlehandedly brought one company to its maturity without actually benefiting from it in return, that company is called Twitter. There's a certain primal pleasure in expressing words in quick succession over a full keyboard. Now the Twitter guy has a new adventure, Medium.com, a blogging platform which caters for longer writings but not long enough to be laborious and tedious, a platform that stresses the purity of writing experience, and a nostalgia for slow(er) communication. I can't see how the BB guys are yet to see what an opportunity goldmine that is almost specifically tailored for Blackberry handsets.
5 Be single minded.
Build one newsreader, one email client, one photo taking /editing/ sharing app, and make them really good, constantly improving it, for free. Concentrate, be single minded, build up an eco system from scratch, keep up with the real demands of the time and cut through the absolute useless apps that are wasting time, be concise.
Then Blackberry has a chance to be a cult again.