Q: In terms of timing, why now? I don’t want to say Android, but they’re obviously catering very heavily to developers. Do you think that played at all into the need to have something like this for BlackBerry Developers?
A: No, it was purely internally-focused on where we were in terms of building a market. As I said, our customers brought us in a direction ever since the launch of the Pearl, that all of a sudden individuals were buying our product whether their company asked them to or not, and they were just saying ‘I really want a BlackBerry for myself.’ That brought us into a whole new area of functionality, utility, applications, API, UI techniques, and platform enablers like Wi-Fi and GPS, and all these things that we put in the device to cater to this massive new market that all of a sudden took interest in our platform.
It’s only been in the last year or two that this happened, so the timing was purely internally-driven. I mean, sure, there’s a lot of other companies – I would say Android and iPhone and others has more to do with the whole smartphone market taking off. It’s not really a coincidence, because the companies that are focused on smartphones are doing well right now compared to regular cellular phones. The actual timing for this event was purely based on where we were in developing our developer community.