The Rise and Fall of Blackberry
BlackBerry once reigned as the king of smartphones, selling more than 50 million units at its peak. The company first produced pagers and handsets, but in the early 2000s, the first version of its smartphone with its iconic keyboard took shape. Soon, Blackberry phones were everywhere. Blackberry formerly held a 20% global market share and 43% of the US market for smartphones. But the company no longer manufactures smartphones. Additionally, it completely stopped supporting its phones in January 2022, therefore leaving blackberries outdated. So, what happened?
Research In Motion (RIM) was founded in 1984 by two Canadian engineering students, Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin. As an early pioneer in mobile messaging, Rogers, a Canadian telecom corporation, hired Research In Motion to develop on their mobile Tech’s network in 1989. The system was created exclusively for messaging. Fast forward to 1996, when the business produced its first two-way pager. At the time, it was innovative since it supported email and allowed wireless communication with other devices connected to its network. In 2002, the company unveiled its first cell phone. The design was updated over the following years, with features such as a color display, Wi-Fi, and a built-in camera. During that time, Blackberry discovered a way to turn its phone to become a necessity for the wealthy and powerful. And owning it was a status symbol that said a lot about who you are as a person. And that’s how the name Crackberry came about, people were so addicted to it and so accustomed to feeling connected at all times.
The BlackBerry had a simple design and an easy learning curve. And it was clearly marketed to business professionals. With a Blackberry, they could respond to emails or browse the web, basically anything they might normally need a computer to do. But what Blackberry really shine is this beloved feature called BlackBerry Messenger. The BBM messaging service was a key component of BlackBerry’s success. The company figured out really early on that people wanted to have an instant connection to people, they want to be able to message back and forth without limits, and being able to use the BBM also added to that exclusive club of BlackBerry-only users.
By 2007, the company was pulling in more than $3 billion in revenue, with a net income of more than $631 million. So, at that point, Blackberry was just dominating the US market. And the company didn’t yet see the iPhone as a big threat. “They all have these keyboards that are there whether you need them or not to be there. But what we’re going to do is get rid of all these buttons and just make a giant screen”, this is how Steve Jobs addressed the issue of Blackberry’s physical keyboard while launching the first iPhone. After the release of the iPhone, people were shocked. It was something they had never seen before. It was a full touchscreen device, and that was a huge leap in innovation at that point for the mobile industry. BlackBerry was still using physical keyboards at that point. But the iPhone didn’t kill BlackBerry immediately. It just signed its death warrant. In 2008, Research In Motion unveiled a Blackberry flip phone. In addition, the first touchscreen device was the Blackberry Storm, which arrived shortly after. Because of the phone’s poor performance and many bugs, critics mocked the storm and labeled it as a clear letdown. Blackberry phones, however, kept selling for a few reasons. Customers in the US were forced to choose between changing the service providers or choosing another phone because the iPhone was pricey and only available for AT&T users until 2011. Additionally, individuals simply did not want to give up using physical keyboards.
BlackBerry was thus good for the time being. The business, however, overlooked how fast the smartphone industry was expanding. Every year, Apple released a new version of the iPhone, and rival cellphones like the Motorola Droid started to appear on store shelves. It attempted to keep up. It released brand-new, cutting-edge gadgets like the playbook tablet and flashlight. However, the gadgets were not warmly accepted. Even worse, the Playbook didn’t come with an email app, rendering it worthless to a consumer base that was more business oriented.
The debut of the iPhone 4 in June 2010 served as the death blow for BlackBerry. Sales of Apple phones soon overtook those of BlackBerry for the second time, but this time they remained. BlackBerry was slow to change and there was no dedicated BlackBerry app store. Furthermore, Apple and Android made it easier for developers to implement and be creative with their products, but Blackberry did not. The phones were missing a lot of desirable features, like high-quality front and rear cameras. The global market share of Research in Motion started to decline, falling from 20% in 2009 to less than 5% prior to the end of 2012.
BlackBerry replaced Research In Motion as the company’s official name in 2013. It eventually made its spec-competitive touchscreen phone available that year, but it was already too late. At this point, people were buying either iPhones or Android. Additionally, global sales of smartphones reached above 432 million in the fourth quarter of 2016. However, just 200,000 of those were BlackBerry phones, which gave BlackBerry around 0% market share for smartphones. And in 2016, Chinese consumer electronics company TCL bought the BlackBerry phone brand. This led to the company’s departure from the smartphone market 14 years after the release of its first phone. The deal was for TCL to design and manufacture the hardware, while BlackBerry provided the software. But more recent Blackberry phones run on an Android operating system, not a Blackberry one. This gives users their beloved App Store and many more customization options. The latest BlackBerry phone the Key2 was released in 2018. And it might be the last. The BlackBerry 5G scheduled for release in 2021 never appeared and in December 2021, the company announced that it would fully decommission its operating system, meaning that older Blackberry phones would no longer be expected to reliably function. It was the final nail in the coffin for the phenomenon that was the Blackberry. But Blackberry the company lives on mainly making cybersecurity software. And despite their downfall, the history of smartphones would not have existed without these iconic phones.
