RIM’s complacency and flat-footed response to the iPhone has been very well covered, and can be Googled. By the time they were trying to partner with Google, it was already too late for them. Android is not what killed the Blackberry.
Other sources, such as Chet Haas's book, make it clear that what became the G1 was already on the roadmap. It was just prioritized.
The elephant in the room is the heavy natural monopoly on software compatibility/interoperability, and the above thought experiment only makes sense because Android is a purportedly open platform.
Effective tech anti-trust has to work around that and not merely police behavior aimed at restricting competition. I'd personally say that modern tech anti-trust should be focused around mandating open access to proprietary systems (for starters, anything a web user can do, a program running on the user's behalf should be able to do), and privacy legislation to make it so that customers have to be earned rather than everyone being treated as a data subject by default.
I actually think it's not possible to be objective on that matter, hence it needs to be properly explained, to understand the limitations of one post (but the goal is to have many posts, so hopefully readers can reject the ones they feel is wrong)
> For example the article you link says that Google and Blackberry worked jointly on the 1:1 format phone, and jointly decided to stop working on it. That hardly sounds like an abusive monopolist.
Let's just say that I've seen a bit of first-hand, and a lot of second-hand of "Google working jointly with XXX", and in the vast majority, Google-side doesn't spend much engineering time on those issues. I completely agree this is not an objective point of view. This can hardly be proved, shown or explained, so I have no issue with you not taking my word for it. Hopefully if other people join this project, there might turn out /some/ people that you do trust?
> And sure, at that point Android was more popular than the BlackBerry OS. But this actually demonstrates healthy competition. I had a Blackberry for work, and so did all my coworkers. Blackberry was the dominant mobile platform once.
I wouldn't exactly call the replacement of BBOS by Android a "healthy competition", when the main reason Android won was that it was an OS completely free of charge, paid for by another recurring stream for the company. (I'm not saying Android was worse than BBOS, that I have no idea, )
> Through complacency and poor decision-making, they stopped innovating and competing. And thus, allowed new products with zero installed base on day one to come in and take their market.
That's irrelevant, and belongs to opinions.