That’s not true. The iPhone became good enough to replace the BlackBerry around 4 or 5 years in. By 2011, the BlackBerry was losing market share as Apple added enterprise features.

They do lots of other things a lot better, but email? Nope.

Based on reactions from co-workers though, it seems I'm much more efficient at touch-typing than most of them, even on a fullsize keyboard. And the experience does translate to a physical phone keyboard, even at the smaller size, so that may well be where some of the disconnect is.

Note also when touch-typing on my phone, I get the full speed by using both thumbs, not just one.

Case in point: people spelling "definitely" as (I assume) "definately" only to be autocorrected to "defiantly" without noticing. That sort of "correction" completely changes the meaning of a sentence.

Every time haptic feedback turns off for "power saving" when I'm running low on battery, I immediately wonder how anyone ever manages to type anything at all without mucking things up all the time.

I'd still prefer a physical keyboard, though.

Stipulated, it definitely depends on personal preferences and workflows as to what you personally prefer.

But it is pretty incontrovertible that Blackberry was a finely-honed email tool with departures from that core use case being pretty tightly defined around the things you do ancillary to email (setting appointments, reading attachments, etc.).

iPhone is worse at that particular thing -- but vastly more capable broadly speaking for a universe of other things.

Other than that, what specifically did it enable that the other phones didn't?

The BlackBerry Email client definitely didn’t have a method of integrating third party storage providers like Dropbox which was definitely a thing by 2011.

But, that's just me speculating...

[0] http://www.braddye.com/newsletters/2010/n22jan2010.html

The push service was quite good IMHO. Every carrier that supported BlackBerry Internet Service had a leased line or VPN to the RIM NOCs. The phones would connect to BIS servers at the carrier which then communicated over these backhauls to RIM. Because it was all so deeply integrated in the carriers network (I believe the BIS servers acted as a Gateway GPRS Support Node), the BIS servers knew exactly where on the network each phone was, so they could send essentially a UDP packet directly to the device, which was listening on a particular port. No long standing TCP connections, and of course if the device didn't acknowledge messages, they were queued at RIM for when the device reentered coverage.

Email was provided by a server side process that opened MAPI (the original exchange RPC protocol) connections to exchange mailboxes and asked to be pinged if there were changes in mailboxes. When that happened, the BES server would pull the changes, package them, forward them to the RIM NOC over the proprietary SRP protocol, which would locate the right carrier, send the packet over the backhaul, and then from the carrier it would make its way to the phone.

Source: used to run a BES server

With ActiveSync, my email will usually reach my phone/cellular watch/iPad before it reaches my computer.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/05/blackberry_gi...

https://www.engadget.com/2016/04/18/blackberry-ceo-wont-say-...

But in my experience, smaller businesses can actually be worse offenders in this regard. Large enterprises actually do have a lot of complex needs and even relatively small changes affect a lot of people. But I've had someone at a very small company argue with me that they needed their own Exchange server because Gmail (at the time) didn't have some features like sub-labels/folders that they were used to.

That's maybe another way of showing that UX is not the winning differentiator in enterprise that it is in consumer.

> This reads like someone who lives in the valley and thinks the valley is in any way reflective of corporate America.

I don't live in that valley, and I fully know that it doesn't reflect the rest of US or world, and that is why, indeed, enterprise UX does suck! :)

I think we agree... I'm not hearing an argument from you that it's because of superior UX that people are sticking to O365.

But it is. That and useful features. Both of which Office has, and GSuite has not.

I don't remember the name of that "Word lite" program that was included with Windows for free around Vista/7, which could open less sophisticated .doc files and was a default binding for .rtf files. But compared to Microsoft Office, GSuite is like that program, but on the web.

Meanwhile, the killer app of G Docs (collaboration) is a very frequently unanswered need. People emailing attachments with ridiculous names like "contract_v2_final_finalforreal.docx", making conflicting edits that cannot be reconciled, carrying USB sticks around because their PPT presentation is too big for email and they can never figure out how to use shared folders, etc.

Word has a lot of features and, for certain publishing needs, these are important.

But what gsuite adds is usability. You no longer need shared drives. You no longer need to email docs around, you no longer need Spec_new_v3_new.doc.

I don't even need my computer any more, I can use anyone's.

I also don't need the immense amount of publishing and formatting options word provides. What I need to do is create documents that can be shared and collaborated on easily.

Skype for business is an abomination, it’s morally wrong, it’s an evil that must die.

I’m hoping Zoom can murder it viciously.