BlackBerry to Enter IoT Fray in 2016
posted Sunday Dec 20, 2015 by Scott Ertz
It should be no surprise that BlackBerry is in trouble. The company has had longstanding financial trouble, starting when the smartphone industry changed out from under them. They were incapable of adapting to the changes in the market, as consumers began purchasing smartphones faster than enterprise customers, who wanted different hardware and features than BlackBerry were offering.
In the past 8 years they have tried a lot to recover, including their failed PlayBook tablet, their BlackBerry 10 operating system and a slue of new hardware. All of this has been powered by their QNX operating system platform, a company they purchased in 2010. While the platform has not been successful in either location, it has had a lot of success in vehicle entertainment systems, which was its original intent.
BlackBerry, as part of their recovery plans, will try to bring QNX to the Internet of Things. It would appear that the plan is to try to get ahead of a tech trend, instead of waiting for it to prove itself out before jumping in. They will have some swift competition, however, from the likes of Microsoft and Google, both of whom have large, trained development communities who will not need much, if any, additional training to be able to develop software, both internal and external, for IoT devices.
Not everyone makes their choices based on technology, though; it is possible that companies might pick a platform because of the name associated. Unfortunately for BlackBerry, they will also likely go to Microsoft or Google, since BlackBerry's name lost its value long ago. If they are going to be successful in this realm, they are going to have to show off A LOT of hardware partners at CES this year, with just as many reasons to choose them vs others.
