Sometimes, you just have to drink the bong water.
Finally, Blackberry is generating some buzz. The Canadian company is preparing to make and bring to market an Android powered phone, according to the Crackberry.com website. It’s a necessary step, if the company has any hope of wringing value of out the ashes of its former empire.
Blackberry is still trying to find its way in the world. Historically, it’s had three core competencies: an operating system, hardware manufacturing, and a secure platform for enterprise software. Email is the most well known example of the latter, but Blackberry also has document handling and basic security capabilities too.
The company has long said that it want its enterprise software to run on other OSes, and Android is the best candidate for that. Apple is unlikely, to say the least, to let Blackberry into the iOS ecosystem in any meaningful way.
So to generate value from its enterprise platform, it has to get into the Android world. Making a handset that integrates the Blackberry enterprise platform with the Android OS is the logical way to demonstrate how well it works, and it lets Blackberry leverage its manufacturing core competency, or at least squeeze something out of it.
You can say that Blackberry is backing away from its own OS, but the reality is that it’s declining to follow its OS into oblivion. Exactly the same thing is going on at Microsoft now, where Android is getting more attention as the company tries to position itself as a cross platform service provider.
If there’s any value left in Blackberry, it’s in the enterprise platform and not the OS or handset manufacturing.