This is 100% the reason. I watched BlackBerry fail from the inside and there’s always been an extremely vocal minority of former BB users who want to go back to a physical keyboard. This is a niche product for that audience at best, it will never have mass market appeal as a primary device. I don’t think it will have mass market appeal as a secondary device for the same reasons as others have pointed out in this thread either, but I respect them shooting their shot I guess.
Blackberry made regular slab phones too and they were massively outsold by the keyboard ones. Why would anyone buy a slab phone running an obscure OS that lacked any major apps, when Android and iPhone were available? The keyboard was always the selling point.
The fact of the matter is that the smartphone market could not support more than a few players. Blackberry was just one of several vendors without vertically integrated supply chains that disappeared: HTC, Nokia, LG and Sony all abandoned the market as well.
You’re operating with massive hindsight bias here. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion in 2007 that iOS and Android were going to win. BlackBerry (and indeed many of the players you listed) had a chance to compete and they simply didn’t. Also I’m not sure where you got the idea that BlackBerry didn’t have a vertically integrated supply chain. They absolutely did. I worked there in the mid-2000s and the hardware was manufactured literally down the street from where the OS and apps were built.
MacOS is also an operating system or a platform. Tesla isn't really a platform.
But... funny you brought up Tesla, because Tesla also had this exact problem! Tesla had the supercharging network, which they own and manufacture. But superchargers aren't just a product, they're a platform.
Tesla had a monopoly on superchargers, until they pre-emptively opened up the network and open sourced the connector. If they hadn't, IMO it was extremely likely they would've been forced, eventually.
My mind immediately went to surveying the participants in a Skinner box on their perceived well being. It would be incredible if people DIDN'T self-report feeling great after pulling the dopamine levers
Any "competitive advantage" gained by these points will be more than wiped out by the extreme difficulty companies will have attracting talent if they don't offer remote flexibility. All of the data I've seen so far is pretty clear that yours is a minority opinion among tech workers.
Have you tried the recently added container support? There's a component provided called the Lambda Runtime Interface Emulator that exposes an API for the locally running container. In my experience this is miles better than the original approach.
Awesome idea. You don't seem to be listed in non-US app stores (Canada, in my case). Any plans to be available internationally, or at least in the same countries served by Twilio?
I eventually found it by searching "burner phone". Fyi, your iTunes link on the site is broken for me, giving a generic "can't connect to iTunes Store". Thanks :)
great idea. this is actually how my wife and i met. no joke. i had just ended a long relationship and changed my status on facebook. she noticed and started messaging me.
People have started relationships on/through Facebook that have turned into marriages. A bit of a blow to the part of me that thinks of Facebook as new.
