Why did the BlackBerry become extinct?

In 2010, BlackBerry had almost half of the global cell phone market and a market capitalization of 110 billion dollars.

Three years later, it fell to 6% of the market. Today it is worth zero and the company does not exist.

It was one of the most abrupt and impressive business disappearances in history. History of technology. The reasons for its fall are several and with the particularity that they occurred simultaneously in a very short period of time.

Even today, in 2024, the case is still being analyzed in the business schools, under the same questions: What happened? Why did BlackBerry fall?

Among the many reasons, two stand out: one unusual succession of errors of management and the entry into the mobile industry of two giants: Apple with its first iPhone model (in 2007) and Google, with its Android operating system.

Today, the BlackBerry is only a nostalgic memory in the memory of two generations but that, without a doubt, earned an important place in the history of modern technology.

And with justice, because beyond its collapse and the errors of its leadership, the truth is that a few years before the birth of “all-screen touch” cell phones, like the current ones, the first BB models were pure innovation. They brought simplicity, design and functionality to the world.

The Blackberry was revolutionary because it was the first massive smart cell phone with qwerty keyboard to receive and send emails.

It meant carrying a PC in my pocket for the first time. It allowed remote and remote work, so common today, and that is why it changed the concept of mobility forever.

It was also one of the icons of the time and the status symbol of the first decade of the century, post fall of the Twin Towersand the beginning of the mobile era, when the internet had already taken its first dot.com stumble.

By 2002, in the major cities of the world there was no business executive or important politician (or one who aspired to be one) who did not wear his BB. in hand typing emails and messages at all times and places. Presidents (Barack Obama was an addict), CEOs, celebrities like Kim Kardashian and elite athletes were proud ambassadors of their Blackberry.

Everyone wanted to have one. It is no exaggeration to say that BB ushered in today’s addictive 24/7 online era.

The rise and fall of the company features its fiction, a mix of biopic and documentary. The movie BlackBerry: the beginning of the story (released in 2023, can now be seen on Prime Video and lasts two hours) is inspired by the book Losing the Signal (Losing Signal, 2015), by journalists Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, which details the rise and failure of the company Canadian Research In Motion (RIM), which was an empire as influential as it was ephemeral.

RIM was born in 1984 when Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin (played by Matt Johnson, who is also the director and screenwriter of the film), two very nerdy friends who were engineering students, founded a computer electronics company in the city of Ontario with the idea of ​​manufacturing communication devices different from the known ones.

Years passed and they couldn’t make money or any successful products. They were a group of very young friends, video game and movie fansstacked in a dark and dirty commercial premises.

But inspiration and luck came in 1999, when Lazaridis discovered that they could use free an internet band that no one used and take advantage of it to send and receive emails.

Then he built a rudimentary portable device pager type and cell phone with a full keyboard that, in addition to calls, could also send and receive emails. They named it BlackBerry.

In addition to being able to receive and send emails, RIM devices came with an integrated instant messaging application called BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), which allowed direct messages between devices of the brand for free and unlimited.

In other words, it allowed you to chat live with anyone from anywhere, something that seems common now, but back then it wasn’t.

We have to think a world pre notebooks and pre smartphones. The only thing there was was SMS, but the telephone operators charged for each sending.

The BBM came to put an end to that business. The app was a kind of father of the current WhatsApp and worked with a PIN, an eight-character alphanumeric keyunique to each user.

“Give me your PIN” was a typical phrase of the time. Furthermore, the messages went and They came encrypted, which favored entering the world of politics and business. BBM was also the favorite among teenagers to chat. Having a BB was having the future in the palm of your hand.

In the golden era of BlackBerry, consultant Mariano Amartino created the blog Denken Über, specialized in mobile phones.

Today he remembers: “At RIM they were the first to understand the need and the advantage of being constantly connected to the BBM through secure servers, which is why they were the first to use it was the financial sector. And they did it at a low cost because it did not overload the data network as it is a push technology, an advantage for operators.”

“Then they were late for almost everything and the end consumer, unlike the corporate consumer, has fewer demands regarding security. And then BlackBerry lost that cool factor that Apple had with the iPhone. And unfortunately, it never managed to replace its famous keyboard on a touch screen“, says Amartino.

Lazaridis was a visionary, the nerdy, clumsy and innocent engineer, owner of great technological ideas but without the contacts or social skills necessary to sell them in the corporate world.

Two skills that result key to success or the failure of a product, no matter how revolutionary it may be. Then Jim Balsillie appeared on the scene, a ruthless Harvard Business graduate, a very good salesman, but ambitious and unscrupulous.

He became the CEO of RIM. With Lazaridis they distrusted each other, but at the same time they needed each other. Two opposite poles that attract. And success found them quickly.

There was no one who didn’t want to have a BlackBerry in their hand. It was the latest in fashion. Symbol of status, fashion and power. The perfect product. But the higher and faster RIM and its brand climbed, the louder it would make when it fell.

When the iPhone hit the market in mid-2008, many at RIM, including Lazaridis (as seen in the film), laughed at Apple’s new product.

“It doesn’t have a keyboard, no one wants to typing on a screen. It is impossible to write there. It will be a failure,” predicted the engineer, climbing a cloud of ego, money and arrogance.

Against its will, in 2011 the company launched something similar to a touch screen, the model called Torch, which was a complete failure. Lazaridis left RIM in 2012 like Balsillie, convicted in court for artificially inflate stock prices of the company. He didn’t go to jail by a miracle. Today he lives in Waterloo, a city in the province of Ontario.

In 2013, Thorsten Heins took the reins of the company to try to get it back on track with the BlackBerry 10 operating system, but that didn’t work either. It was too late. The cards were already played and the iPhone did not stop selling.

The last thing that was known about BlackBerry before its extinction, at the beginning of 2022, was that sold all his patents at about 600 million dollars.

RIM played hard and lost, you know. Own mistakes, internal disputes that hindered innovation, badly resolved egoswaste of money, financial disasters, uncontrolled growth, lack of timing, disloyalty and betrayal.

Everything happened. And opposite, the vertiginous and merciless business world in Silicon Valley who contributed their grain of sand to a historic and… inevitable collapse?

It is difficult to know at this point but the truth is that, if there was any lesson left by the failure of BlackBerry, it was that it is never a good idea to underestimate one of the golden rules of the industry: technology rules.

No matter how many fans and loyalties are generated, no matter how much money invested in advertising and marketing campaigns, no matter how much branding let it be done, the consumer will always choose to buy the best device available on the market.

This is how Steve Jobs understood it and that is why the winner of this story was the iPhone.