BlackBerry: From Obama’s Phone to Digital Graveyard
I still remember in 2013 when my cousin from America told me she had bought a new phone, a
I still remember in 2013 when my cousin from America told me she had bought a new phone, a BlackBerry. At that time, the brand was unfamiliar to me. It wasn’t famous in my country, so I didn’t realise how popular it actually was. She even mentioned that it was the phone President Barack Obama used. Now, 11 years later, she’s moved on to an iPhone and currently uses Samsung.
This personal story captures the BlackBerry fall from grace perfectly. What was once the ultimate status symbol became yesterday’s technology faster than anyone imagined.
The Rise of a Tech Giant
BlackBerry didn’t start as a phone company. Research In Motion (RIM), founded in Waterloo, Ontario, first developed the Inter@ctive Pager 900, announced on September 18, 1996. The Inter@ctive Pager 900 was a clamshell-type device that allowed two-way paging.
The first device to carry the BlackBerry name was the BlackBerry 850, an email pager, released January 19, 1999. The name BlackBerry was coined by the marketing company Lexicon Branding. The name was chosen out of about 40 potential names, because of the resemblance of the keyboard’s buttons to that of the drupelets that compose the blackberry fruit, and the instant pronunciation which reflected the speed of this push email system.
BlackBerry gained market share in the mobile industry by concentrating on email. The original BlackBerry devices proved to be a major advantage over the typically one-way communication of conventional pagers and removed the need for users to tether to personal computers. It became especially used in the corporate world in the US and Canada.
Peak Success and Celebrity Status
By its peak in September 2011, there were 85 million BlackBerry services subscribers worldwide. The BlackBerry fall seemed impossible then. The device had become more than just a phone. It was a cultural phenomenon.
Lady Gaga tweeted from hers. Madonna slept with one under her pillow. Kim Kardashian owned three of them. When Barack Obama became president, he fought tooth and nail to be able to keep his device. When Naomi Campbell lost her temper with a housekeeper in 2006, she chose the humble BlackBerry as her projectile weapon.
The BlackBerry was instrumental in changing how humans worked. Owning a BlackBerry meant you didn’t have to be stuck at a desk in a strip-lit office to remain connected. It meant you carried the office around with you at all times. You could reply to emails at night, on holiday, or on the toilet.
The device was also extremely addictive. Thanks to its incessantly blinking notification light, it would remind users constantly of a digital world they were missing out on. For this reason, the word “crackberry” became the 2006 Webster’s New World College Dictionary word of the year.
The Revolutionary Keyboard Advantage
The BlackBerry had a full QWERTY keyboard that you could tap away at with both thumbs, making light work of typing. Before this breakthrough, written communication had been a genuine nightmare on numerical keypads, where you had to press each key a certain amount of times to scroll through to the right letter.
Remember typing “fizzy” on a brick phone? First you had to press the three button three times, then the four button three times, then the nine button four times, then pause to let the cursor move, then the nine button four more times, then pause again, and then press nine three final times. The BlackBerry generation can be defined by the sheer relief of only having to press one button once for each letter.
The iPhone Threat and Market Leader Decline
Following the release of the BlackBerry Pearl in September 2006, as well as BlackBerry Messenger software, BlackBerry began attracting mainstream consumers outside its traditional enterprise userbase. The BlackBerry line was for some time the leading smartphone platform in the US.
But the thrill was shortlived. As soon as the iPhone was announced, BlackBerry sales fell off a cliff and would never recover. In the following years, BlackBerry lost market share mainly to Android and iOS platforms. Its numbers had fallen to 23 million in March 2016, a decline of almost three-quarters from its 85 million peak.
The iPhone was designed specifically to usurp the BlackBerry. Steve Jobs had BlackBerry so firmly in his sights that he flashed an image of one onscreen dismissively during the iPhone launch, to show the world exactly what he wanted to destroy.
Management Struggles and Failed Responses
BlackBerry had become quite smug. There was a time when they thought that typing onto a flat sheet of glass wouldn’t work, but within a year the clicky-clicky BlackBerry method of typing seemed completely antiquated.
In 2013, RIM replaced the existing proprietary operating system, BlackBerry OS, with a new revamped platform called BlackBerry 10. On January 30, 2013, BlackBerry announced the release of the Z10 and Q10 smartphones. Both models consisted of touch screens: the Z10 features an all-touch design and the Q10 combines a QWERTY keyboard with touchscreen features.
During the second financial quarter of 2013, BlackBerry sold 6.8 million handsets but was eclipsed by competitor Nokia’s Lumia model for the first time.
On August 12, 2013, BlackBerry announced the intention to sell the company due to their increasingly unfavorable financial position and competition in the mobile industry. Largely due to lower than expected sales on the Z10, BlackBerry announced on September 20, 2013, that 4,500 full- and part-time positions (an estimated 40% of its operating staff) have been terminated and its product line has been reduced from six to four models.
The Final Years and Android Experiment
In 2015, the company began releasing Android-based BlackBerry-branded smartphones, beginning with the BlackBerry Priv. In September 2015, BlackBerry officially unveiled the BlackBerry Priv, a slider phablet that utilizes the Android operating system with additional security and productivity-oriented features inspired by the BlackBerry operating systems.
On July 26, 2016, BlackBerry unveiled a mid-range Android model with only an on-screen keyboard, the BlackBerry DTEK50, powered by Android Marshmallow. Industry observers pointed out that the DTEK50 is a re-branded version of the Alcatel Idol 4 with additional security-oriented software customizations, manufactured and designed by TCL.
The End of an Era
On September 28, 2016, BlackBerry Limited announced it would cease designing its own BlackBerry devices in favor of licensing to partners to design, manufacture, and market. The original licensees were BB Merah Putih for the Indonesian market, Optiemus Infracom for the South Asian market, and BlackBerry Mobile for all other markets.
New BlackBerry-branded products did not manage to gain significant market impact and were last produced in 2020. A new American licensee planned to release a new BlackBerry before it shut down in 2022 without a product.
On January 4, 2022, BlackBerry Limited discontinued its legacy BlackBerry software platform services, which included blackberry.net email, BlackBerry Messenger, BlackBerry World, BlackBerry Protect, and Voice Search.
Lessons from the BlackBerry Fall
The BlackBerry fall demonstrates how quickly technology leaders can lose everything. The company that invented push email and pioneered smartphone features couldn’t adapt fast enough when the market shifted.
Several factors contributed to this market leader decline:
Technological Complacency: BlackBerry believed their physical keyboard was superior to touchscreen typing and didn’t take the iPhone threat seriously enough.
Slow Innovation Response: While Apple revolutionized the smartphone with apps and touchscreen interfaces, BlackBerry stuck to their traditional strengths too long.
Market Misunderstanding: BlackBerry focused on enterprise customers while the consumer market exploded with iPhone and Android devices.
Execution Problems: Even when BlackBerry tried to respond with BlackBerry 10 and later Android phones, the execution was too late and poorly marketed.
The Human Cost
In February 2017, a $20 million class action lawsuit was announced by former employees of the company. The BlackBerry fall wasn’t just about market share. It was about thousands of jobs and a Canadian tech success story that couldn’t sustain itself.
Legacy and Lessons
The general legacy of BlackBerry is one of a company that couldn’t see the writing on the wall. But everyone kind of has an “Oh, isn’t it too bad?” feeling about it. It’s rare to have a citizenry that sympathizes with a billion-dollar corporation, but BlackBerry invokes a human response.
BlackBerry’s reputation is almost like a mom-and-pop company, which is absurd given the scope and power and ambition of that company. The response to the company these days is almost like, “Oh, you ran a company? Oh, that’s so nice. Oh, I’m so sorry.”
What happened to BlackBerry won’t be the only time something similar happens. Public tastes are fickle, and it only takes one new competitor with one gamechanging invention to upend an entire industry. We might look back at BlackBerry with bewildered nostalgia now, but one day something will come along to surpass the iPhone.
The BlackBerry fall reminds us that no market leader is permanent. Success requires constant innovation, market awareness, and the ability to cannibalize your own products before competitors do it for you.
Sources:
- BlackBerry Wikipedia Entry – Historical facts and timeline
- “Dubbed the ‘crackberry’, it was a tech gamechanger and status symbol” – The Guardian
