If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. Learn more.
The BlackBerry is all but dead.
On Monday, the Canadian smartphone maker told the world it will finally take itself private, which barely registers as news. The most surprising thing is that the company held on so long.
Most people will tell you that, through a mix of corporate dysfunction and sheer lack of inspiration, BlackBerry failed to hold its own in the smartphone wars of the last half-decade. And so, the voices proclaim, the one-time giant was crushed under the feet of new, more innovative competitors -- the quintessential Silicon Valley tale of creative destruction. It's the kind of thing that happens all the time, and that looks set to continue in the smartphone arena: The current masters will become tomorrow's also-rans, and a new upstart will rise to displace the incumbents.
But in the smartphone game, that won't happen. Even a hypothetically better-run BlackBerry never stood a chance against Apple. Once Apple introduced the iPhone, the paradigm was set -- there wasn't anything especially new the Blackberry could do. Sure, it could have tried to outrace Apple early on to a better version of the same idea, but no one was going to out-Jobs Steve Jobs. (Google only managed to compete by open-sourcing a new operating system -- a business model rather than a technological innovation that wasn't really an option for a hardware maker like BlackBerry.)
>Even a hypothetically better-run BlackBerry never stood against Apple. Once Apple introduced the iPhone, the paradigm was set -- there wasn't anything especially new the Blackberry could do.
As BlackBerry disappears from view, something much larger than the demise of one company is under way in the mobile market. The end of BlackBerry isn't just about the end of BlackBerry. This could be the end of any radical innovation in mobile, period. Even Apple has run its course: Where else can it go?
"The new iPhones look like the old iPhones. They sound like the old iPhones. They do the same things as the old iPhones. Just slightly better, more colorfully, and less expensively than the old iPhones," Matt Buchanan wrote in The New Yorker last week. "(P)hones have matured to the point that, until a truly radical breakthrough in computing technology occurs, there is not much left to improve on."
The good thing about one technology topping out, he says, is that it frees up businesses to invent new ones. He points to wearables such as Google Glass as one obvious category. But then he rightly says that such devices already seem a little boring -- "remarkably like tiny iPhones bolted to our heads and fastened to our wrists."
WIRED's Mat Honan picked up on this theme of mobile mundanity when the original iPhone 5 was announced. He pointed to the paradox of experiencing a device such as the iPhone -- a radical departure not just in computing but ultimately in the conduct of daily life that didn't even exist a decade ago -- and finding it boring, even while understanding what an incredible feat of human ingenuity it represents. "That has almost nothing to do with Apple and everything to do with our expectations," Honan said.
A collective "meh" accompanied the unveiling of the iPhones 5s and 5c, which boasted only incremental improvements over the iPhone 5. And yet Apple says it sold 9 million of these devices upon their official release this past weekend. The total blows away the old record and promises more big profits for Apple.
These customers didn't flock to the phones because they wanted a fingerprint sensor or a slightly better camera. The reality is that Apple's new models are synced with cell phone contract cycles. After two years, contracts have expired, and our two-year-old phones have taken a beating. A phone with slightly better features at the same subsidized price meets consumers where they're living.
Even Apple fanatics who upgrade out of sheer love aren't really chasing the new innovations. After all, the new tools on the new iPhones barely qualify as such.
All of which suggests that iPhones -- and perhaps smartphones in general -- have entered their PC phase. Try to remember the last truly transformative change in laptops, for example. In the last decade, they've gotten smaller, thinner, and faster. Memory and storage have increased, as has battery life. Displays have become sharper. As with the new iPhones, these are all incremental changes.
Possibly the most disruptive thing that could happen to smartphones, as Buchanan suggests, isn't really about smartphones themselves, but a radical improvement in battery technology. Imagine a phone that could go for a month of heavy use on one charge, which, alongside other improvements, could give us constant location awareness we could actually depend on. Perhaps then smartphones could truly become the personal assistant of our augmented-intelligence dreams, a possibility that doesn't really work if you're constantly having to ration the device's use and compromise its portability by plugging it into the wall.
If mobile innovation is already over, the future doesn't look promising for companies still racing to catch up. As BlackBerry crumbled and Apple bragged, Microsoft announced the release of its new Surface tablet, and like the post-iPhone BlackBerry, it doesn't stand a chance. Though the first Surfaces got a lot of press, they didn't find many customers, which forced Microsoft to take a $900 million write-down. The new version offers a bit more, but not enough.
As WIRED's Alexandra Chang wrote from the launch event: "None of the Surface Pro 2 updates are all that surprising. Indeed, the changes are fairly subtle, as Surface Product Manager Panos Panay repeatedly emphasized." Changes in the Surface 2 are apparently "more drastic," but when it comes down to it, these are just better specs.
>As BlackBerry crumbled and Apple bragged, Microsoft announced the release of its new Surface tablet, and like the BlackBerry, it doesn't stand a chance.
What's more, we can't expect anything radically new from Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia, a company whose BlackBerry-like trajectory made selling its business the only viable option for survival. Perhaps Microsoft could open-source its Windows Phone operating system in hopes of creating a widely used Android-like platform. Unlike Google, however, Microsoft's business model still depends primarily on selling software. And with Android claiming nearly 80 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, the demand for an Android alternative seems low, to say the least.
If mobile devices truly have become boring, maybe the fault lies with us, the consumers -- our hamster-like impatience, our insatiable desire for the new. But perhaps it's just common sense: Something new comes along, effects radical change, then settles into a long series of variations on a theme. Maybe that's boring, but maybe that's okay too.
If mobile technology really has entered a long period of stagnation -- or more charitably, incremental improvement -- it's certainly possible that our impatience for something new will grow apocalyptic. Or maybe the anticlimax of BlackBerry's failure signals the start of something less dramatic and possibly more important.
The less time we spend obsessing over our shiny new devices, the more time we'll have to use them for stuff that's interesting, useful, important. Because in the end, what's a smartphone but another tool? Sure, you can build a slightly better hammer -- sturdier wood, stronger metal. But the real power comes in how you swing it.
