I’ve been porting my old blog posts over from the Utah Economist Blogger site to this new WordPress home page, and it’s given me a good excuse to revisit some of the ideas I’ve written about in the past.
Sometimes I’m even right! (Imagine that, an economist getting it right…) Blackberry seems pretty much dead as a smartphone platform, as I suggested about a year ago. Smartphones are a two-sided market, and you have to get developers and end-users to coordinate on your platform to win. The expectations of each side of the market matters for the others’ decisions, which means it can be really hard to catch up once you fall behind (as BlackBerry did). While the stock got a little bump today on hopes that the MSFT/Nokia deal would spur some interest in BBRY (from whom, I don’t know), it’s been a rough ride ever since the bad news in late June that BlackBerry 10 shipments weren’t meeting expectations.
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