This year I take my curiosity of algorithms and pair it with my design work. Pedro Domingos is a professor of computer science at the University of Washington.
Additionally I’ve put grasshopper into my learning queue for this year.
I’m reading about 2 Italian friends, “My brilliant friend”.
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Currently reading the Rampart Trilogy. I’m just about done with book 2. It is a post post apocalyptic tale set in the UK set about 500 years after something has happened to greatly reduce the number of humans. Much of the world has turned into a hostile forrest separating isolated groups. There is some technology left over from the before times but few people know how to use it.
Just put down, “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry”. Great book. Readable.
My thinking going in was that the iPhone launched, BB was not ready and failed to jump on multi-touch fast enough. The book reveals that they actually had 3+ years to respond and opportunities and they either missed them or actively turned them down. The most damning was when Verizon, who couldn’t have the iPhone because of Apple’s deal with AT&T, told BB: Build us a multi-touch LTE phone and we will make sure it sells. Lazaridis came to the presentation and said, “Here’s a 2G phone with a keyboard because battery life and low data use”. Verizon essentially dumped BB on the ride home.
A bit for those looking for how to innovate: BB Messenger was started by two programmers and two interns. The programmers were both reprimanded for working on BBM because it wasn’t an approved project. It ended up fueling the company for it’s last couple years of relevancy.
One last point is that Basillie seemed to catch on at the end. He wanted to port BBM to iPhone and Android and charge a small fee to carriers to access BBM. The board shut the project down immediately after he stepped down. They thought the future was hardware. Oops.
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Thanks for the recap @Mr-914 …. Sounds like a good one! Great case study in misunderstanding what made themselves successful… which I think is easy to do when you become so successful so fast. Probably a combination of that and thinking you can do no wrong because you got a couple of things really right.
And it resembles Nokia’s story of being caught out by the iPhone. Heady years!
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One other thing that was new to me was how much went into the early BB. To summarize, Ericsson developed a wireless data network called Mobitex that was intended to allow police and other services to send data over the phone and cel network. Rogers, a telephone company in Ontario bought some Mobitex equipment, but their engineers couldn’t get it to work. They hired RIM to figure it out and install it. That gave RIM a unique knowledge of how this early data network actually worked that basically no one else had, not even Ericsson because the consumer products engineers weren’t working with the network engineers.
Pager networks had been seeking an efficient text network, but they kept running into problems. In steps RIM to offer Rogers (who had pagers) a text pager working on the Mobitex network equipment they set up (96-ish). Based on that mild success, and the fact that e-mail was blowing up for business, gave them the idea of writing some software that would sync an e-mail inbox and forward the e-mails also to the first BB using the Mobitex network.
Notice, this was all nuts and bolts engineering and the goal was a business one. Nothing about downloading U2 songs or browsing Amazon for dog food. I think that was partly the blind spot that they maintained, but not entirely.
BB and all other phone makes had contracts strictly limiting sales or even updates of their phone software. If BB had an app, it had to be the phone company that sold it. Due to the BB success, they snuck a line in their contracts that allowed them to “update software and add features” after sale. Inspired by the iPod, they made a model that shipped with no web browser, camera or mp3 player, but those features would all be activated when the customer connected to the network. The phone companies threatened to pull BB from the shelves, but they had gotten too big. The important point is though, they did understand that people’s demands had changed.
However, they knew too much about networking. The first iPhone wasn’t really usable in the way a smartphone is usable today because data was slow and expensive. But, the telephone companies had changed. They used to avoid unproven tech, but with the iPhone and Android data demands, they changed tack and went all in on 3G and LTE. BB had expected them to stick with 2G networks for far longer.
So, the interesting part of the book is that it details that they did at times understand the end customer, but they completely missed what the carriers would do. Also, they did have some goes at multi-touch, but were too reluctant to go all in. That was complicated by the software they had developed, which was really light and fast on slower chips, but ultimately limiting on faster hardware. They could never quite understand how to maintain the older phones on their network and get a new OS to work over the same system, so they kicked the can down the road (common start up problem…). That did lead to some good decisions that didn’t pan out, like buying QNX (an OS company). Unfortunately, it was a little too late and progress was slow.
Another thing that is remarkable is that BB exists today. Nokia, Motorola and earlier Canadian tech darling Nortel are all bankrupt. This is thanks to Balsillie and BB’s board. They hoarded cash in the same way Apple does. The pile was so big that they could survive, even while failing. Thinking of that now, it might actually be the greatest feat in tech history and worthy of more attention.
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Nokia spun off and sold Mobile Telephony unit and that is “dead” but Nokia Networks and the hardware/software infrastructure for cellular telephony is still a viable business. https://www.nokia.com/
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From what I have heard @Niti_Bhan and @Mr-914 a lot of these early mobile telecom companies have significant IP portfolios around the transmission of data on cellular networks and still collect quite a bit in licensing fees surrounding their patents to basically anyone that makes a smartphone… so there is that part of the business as well. I assume this is part of the reason Google bought Motorola and then resold it minus the patents… again, scuttlebutt from friends, but it makes sense.
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This is true. In Nokia’s case, the portfolio alone was worth a billion https://www.nokia.com/licensing/patents/
I should have said MS/Nokia is out of the market. Someone bought the Nokia brand and they continue in handsets. Also, I did know that Nokia, post handset sale to MS, still makes network equipment.
@Mr-914 and @Niti_Bhan I know we are going well off topic here but I read a daily news recap from historian Heather Cox Richardson (great newsletter in my opinion, and she often gives historical context for events)… and in a bit about the World Bank she mentions a select number of companies being invited to speak… including Nokia. I assume for the very mobile com infrastructure reasons as mentioned above.
Read the full piece if you like: May 22, 2023 - by Heather Cox Richardson
I guess it still connects to the topic of “what are you reading” 
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Just finished Recursion… it was one of those books that I could not put down! I read it in 5 days. Definitely one of the more inventive SciFi story lines about being able to go into past memories and alter them.
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sorry for the delay… been swamped by deadlines for scholarships and funding - lemme take a look at the link
given its context, it reads to me like an attempt to have an anti-Huawei leverage legacy infrastructure capacity in the “global South” where Nokia originally opened the markets to affordable durable mobile telephony
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I’m reading “Venus’s Underground” by Jeff Vandermeer written in 2003… it is a beautifully written book. This quote struck me.
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Sapiens - a brief history of mankind
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