With the launch of the Blackberry Z10, the company looks to be trying everything. They have placed advertisements in Super Bowl, they have garnered positive reviews of their products and they finally seem like having a product that can compete in the market. In all this, I strongly believe they have missed out one key segment, software engineers.
Blackberry can’t forget marketing to them as well, part of the success of the iPhone, Android and even to a certain extent Windows Phone 8 is the presence of applications. No ecosystem is functional on its own without its applications – imagine using Android or your iPhone without any of the applications which you installed, which will probably hold true for Blackberry as well.
Blackberry will have to not only convince the consumers that the new phone is perfect for them, but they would also need to convince the software engineers to create applications for their ecosystem. Blackberry did have one program for them, that is to port their current applications to work with the new operating system of Blackberry but that definitely isn’t enough. It seemed to be a 36 hour process which involved eventually getting $100 if ported successfully and a chance to win a device.
My issue with such a program is that it isn’t encouraging new ideas, it is existing older ideas into a new platform. I feel Blackberry should experiment with their developers and encourage them to introduce new ideas, which might not have previously been seen in the market before. In doing so, Blackberry will be taking a huge risk, but with the number of people who always have innovative ideas, Blackberry might just come across an idea which changes their product completely.
The key message here is of course, with any new platform, it isn’t just sufficient to target the consumers. For the system to work, it also needs the applications which others bring in, and asking people to do that over multiple Port-A-Thons over 36 hours, only seems like a half solution to a much bigger problem.