Dead again: BlackBerry sinks hopes for a resurrection

I’ve really tried to give BlackBerry the benefit of the doubt for the last year, when it finally released a modern smartphone operating system, the BlackBerry 10 OS, after years of clinging stubbornly to a platform that should have had a decent burial years before. I wasn’t so charitable in 2011, when I wrote that the fat lady had sung for BlackBerry, but that was in the depths of its denial, with its chief executives claiming utter nonsense such as apps were a fad, businesses would never adopt iPhones due to security fears, and users wanted only keyboard-equipped phones.

In 2012, BlackBerry had a come-to-Jesus moment — no doubt a near-death reaction — and got rid of the two co-founders who had refused to adapt to the modern era. The new CEO, Thorsten Heins, was the old CFO, and although he pretended everything was going according to plan, he admitted real change was needed — then made it happen, after many delays and a two-year gap in new models. BlackBerry 10, and the two first devices using it (the Z10 and Q10) would have been great smartphones in 2009, but in 2013 they were just decent. Still, decent was a lot better than obsolete, and I had hope that more positive steps were to come.

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But hardly anyone bought the Z10 or Q10 — BlackBerry fans instead stocked up on the old models still collecting dust in warehouses — and after months of telling the world that sales were good, Heins had to report they were in fact horrible. The company then stirred doubts about its comitment to BlackBerry 10 by producing a new device using the obsolete BlackBerry OS 7. Heins then put BlackBerry up for sale, but no one bit. Heins was fired this fall and replaced with a former Sybase exec, John Chen, who enjoys solid industry respect.

Chen immediately started in on the expected speech on how wonderful everything would be as BlackBerry focused on its core enterprise market, especially for its BES security and menagement capabilities. He offloaded some of the devices business to Foxconn, to save money and reduce financial exposure (more accurately, he didn’t stop this effort, which his predecessor initiated). OK, I thought, BlackBerry will retrench to become a niche hardware provider for governments’ high-security employees and their suppliers, while trying to keep the half of the mobile management market it now has by expanding into Android and iOS management — not glorious, but plausible. I wasn’t ready to second Gartner’s advice that IT move fully away from BlackBerry.

But I started doubting Chen in December, as his “we’re not dead” spiel (and ads) disconnected further and further from reality. It sounded just like the last two sets of BlackBerry leaders: fake optimism disconnected from the real world, with same failed nostrums yet again recycled. When a company keeps proclaiming it’s not dead and keeps trying what failed, you know the end is near.

Misguided pronouncements are one thing, but where I began to doubt the substance of the company, as opposed to just its marketing, was when suddenly Chen said this week BlackBerry was still interested in the consumer market — days after he fired singer Alicia Keys as its global creative director, a role meant to appeal to that vey consumer market. BlackBerry has had a stupid, on-again-off-again dalliance with the consumer market for several years, given that the company is entrely clueless about style and techno-hipness. Every effort in that direction has been laughably dumb. But, hey, let’s try it again while we’re barely hanging on!

Also this week, Chen trotted out to a series of reporters the claim that business users really want keyboards, which will drive BlackBerry’s success. (I couldn’t believe that Re/code’s Ina Fried reported that comment with a straight face.) BlackBerry execs have been saying that the keyboard will save them ever since the iPhone debuted in 2007 — and it simply isn’t true.

The proof is simple: BlackBerry’s own modern keyboard smartphone, the Q10, has garnered very poor sales. The company won’t disclose the numbers, but indications are that the Q10 has sold less than even the poor-selling all-touch Z10. Before the Q10, BlackBerry secretly could tell itself the problem was the old OS, but the Q10 removes that excuse. And keyboard-equipped smartphones have done poorly in the Android world, which is where the vast majority of the buying action can be found these days. If there were a meaningful market for keyboard-equipped smartphones, the Android vendors would be all over it.

If Chen really believes a keyboard is what will save his company, he needs to hang it up now — close down BlackBerry and stop the whistling-Dixie death march.

A company can only fool itself — and try to fool its employees, investors, and customers — so many times before the rest of the world has to abandon it. There are only so many saviors you can claim before you have to admit you can’t be saved. BlackBerry has now reached that point. There’s no there there. Let it go, before we all wish it were dead. I’ve reached that point, and I believe that day is not that far off for everyone else.

This article, “Dead again: BlackBerry sinks hopes for a resurrection,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.