Quote:
Originally Posted by NJBlackBerry
Correction. They DID court app developers. With a robust two OS environment, and minuscule sales, BB10 (and Blackberry hardware) failed because it was too little, too late.
You can't change history.
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I will not disclose details but you can buy my software online (for non-BB platforms).
BlackBerry alienated developers by having 3 different runtime choices, multiple languages, and complete lack of transparency. They support Android so should delete all else and focus on that, with energy because Microsoft is coming that way too!
Developers do not have unlimited resource (i.e. time). They have a product idea. They will
quickly compare the market options and select the solutions that give them the best return on investment. Not all developers will arrive at the same answer. To court some developers BlackBerry simply has to make it possible for those developers to arrive at an answer.
It's a ratio: number of customers / time to market.
For a developer to make an assessment they need to know number of active customers. BlackBerry saying "Several million devices in the market" split over "variety of runtimes" is completely opaque. A simple chart showing number of devices per platform would have sufficed, but based on the information presented we can only arrive at zero.
Time to market is reduced by having robust DevOps, comprehensive API, and complete documentation. Time to market is increased by having more than one platform! "Variety of development languages" is again opaque and off-putting. I can write in any language, but BlackBerry has made my decision difficult by requiring me to compare their API support in Java, JavaScript, C++ etc. I don't have time for that! A simple expandable tree outlining the BlackBerry API support is what I wanted to see.
Current score: 0 / infinity.
BlackBerry published a "developer" website to show to shareholders, not to encourage developers! At the same time BlackBerry made the decision for millions of developers by hiding the important information and wasting their time.
BlackBerry does not need a lot of active users because each developer has different strengths. What they need to do is make it clear how many users there are, and how much effort is needed to put a product in front of those users. Developers will come if developers think they can slot into a market slightly bigger than -infinity.
Currently BB offer a buggy plugin for Android developers, and bugs mean unknown delays for developers. If BlackBerry made a robust Android IDE that worked with other Android phones then they would have developers lining up, and if the BlackBerry API reduced time to market then they would have developers uploading to the BB store first. Porter's five forces is simple to understand.
Will Apple do that? No.
Will Google do that? No.
Will Microsoft do that? Maybe.
Will Amazon do that? Maybe.
Will BlackBerry do that? Probably not.