Can Android can Save Blackberry?

When Charles Warner said “Politics makes strange bedfellows” little did he know that 150 years later, the same quote will equally apply to technology companies! Microsoft-Salesforce, IBM-Apple are examples but the crown will belong to Blackberry if they launch a smartphone running on the Android OS. 

For those not following the rumour mills, the Blackberry device code namedVenice will run Android OS and come with a slider QWERTY keyboard. The speculation is that Blackberry will secure the Android OS and in the words of John Chen 'We only build secure phones and BlackBerry is the most secure phone so, if I can find a way to secure the Android phone, I will also build that.” Once you finish rubbing your eyes on John Chen’s use of ‘I’ in the above quote, I will make you rub your chin by saying it is the best idea from Blackberry for a long time.

Before you close your browser tab and start wondering if John and I have simultaneously gone cuckoo, let me try and explain why BB-Venice can easily become a blockbuster for Blackberry and revive its flagging hardware sales.

Today about 43% of all business mails and 57% of personal mails are first opened on mobile devices and nearly 8% of time spent on mobiles is either in reading or replying to mails. If we look at the typical use of smartphones, we find that text messaging, internet and email are the most popular features and all of these require heavy use of keyboards.

Let us pause here and rewind; from the time iPhone was launched, the physical keyboard was confined to history books and traded for a larger touch screen with virtual keyboard. The only company that BOLDLY (pun intended) persisted with physical keyboards was pushing an OS that should have retired before the physical keyboard. When BB finally upgraded their OS, the world had moved on and 84% of the smartphone market was split between Android and IOS. So to BB horror while they managed to launch a secure and touch friendly OS and put it on devices with physical keyboards, the users shunned the devices due to lack of the application ecosystem.

Let us now forward to 2015 when BB launches Venice with a secure Android OS, physical keyboard, full size touch screen, top of the line hardware specs, bundled with the Blackberry hub and managed by BES12. Now if all of the above happens, I don’t need to wear either my CIO hat and argue why organizations will love this device or wear my geek hat and argue why the retail consumers will grab it off the shelves. The only caution and spoiler to the party can be absurd pricing aka the Classic or Passport (they need to ideally price in the ballpark of Xiaomi and Oneplusone).

In summary adopting and securing Android can become the inflection point for Blackberry and can end their device woes, provided they get the pricing right. The play then will be in the MDM space and what how BB leverages its investment in the brilliant though unsung QNX platform.