Exactly. There's a business reason hardware companies like Nokia got killed (because it wasn't just Nokia. Lots of telco hardware companies were making handsets before and aren't anymore). That seems to me to be that Nokia didn't know how to make $100/user/year by controlling the software like MS and Google do (MS with "enterprise" sales and ads, Google with ads)
Also makes the choice for Microsoft, as opposed to anyone else, very understandable. The other choice that "worked" for cell phone companies was to be a Chinese company, with state subsidies amounting to zero, maybe even negative tax, no environmental regulations at all (my favorite whoopsie was an algae bloom that started inside China and reached 1/4th to 1/3rd the way from China to the US. It is terrifying to think about just how many fish, animals and plants must have suffocated when that happened), plus definitely using WAY cheaper labor, maybe even using slave labor.
I think you just hating and out of touch with reality (if this is not satire) cause how much less substance this comment are
the simple reason they die is because they sucks, that's just it. HN user just overthinking this simple reason the CONSUMER want
user just want something that's good, that's why nokia and blackberry die
not because they got killed by another big corpo, but because they can't adapt
Yeah I don't agree with the tone of this comment but the substance is correct. I didn't own a Nokia phone, so I can't speak to that. But Blackberry died because their phones just plain sucked. Even before the modern smartphone era they were unpleasant to use, but at least they were enabling something that nobody else did. But once the iPhone came along (and Android after that), they had competitors who were flat out better than them in every way.
And even that wouldn't have necessarily killed them, if they had adapted quickly to make this new kind of phone. But instead they made the Blackberry Storm as a "hey we can do this touchscreen thing too", but crippled it by giving it a resistive touchscreen which was incredibly unpleasant to use relative to the competition. And iirc they still insisted on tying it to BES, even though their competitors offered an email experience which Just Worked without having to use RIM's server. It seemed (from the outside to be fair) like RIM refused to recognize that the competition had blown them out of the water, so instead of pivoting to catch up they doggedly tried to offer "what we had before, but with grudging minimal concessions to the things our customers want". But that was never going to work, because customers had never liked their original model to begin with. They liked what it enabled for them, but once competitors could offer the same benefits with a more pleasant to use interface, it was over for that model.
Also makes the choice for Microsoft, as opposed to anyone else, very understandable. The other choice that "worked" for cell phone companies was to be a Chinese company, with state subsidies amounting to zero, maybe even negative tax, no environmental regulations at all (my favorite whoopsie was an algae bloom that started inside China and reached 1/4th to 1/3rd the way from China to the US. It is terrifying to think about just how many fish, animals and plants must have suffocated when that happened), plus definitely using WAY cheaper labor, maybe even using slave labor.