Once a sign of innovation, collaboration and a focused mindset, Blackberry phones have
gone from the must-have tech accessory to an ancient artefact.
After peaking at $147 in 2008, the company’s stock price now sits well below 10,
and since their disappearance from our pockets, Blackberry’s sales have been surviving in
just a few small markets around the globe, with rumours even circulating that their next
venture could include driverless vehicle technology.
So from being the go-to phone for both work and play to nearly obsolete in just ten years,
what led to the downfall of Blackberry and where can you find their phones now?
Here’s how it happened.
Blackberry’s predecessor, Research in Motion, dates back over 30 years, and began to make
a name for itself in 1996 selling pagers like the Inter@ctive Pager 900, offering new features
like two way communication and read receipts.
The very first Blackberry, the 850, was itself a pager, named after the keyboard’s resemblance
to the skin of the fruit that shares the name.
It provided a thumbwheel to the right of the screen and of course the Qwerty keyboard that
we’ve come to know today.
The device was the first clear evidence that Blackberry’s future was in enterprise solutions,
And so what followed was their first device with an integrated phone in 2002, the 6710.
Newer models were then released offering a colour screen, bluetooth, and a design that
was getting slimmer and more portable as the technology improved.
But Blackberry’s most competitive advantage arrived in 2005, with the launch of Blackberry
Messenger, the company’s proprietary instant messaging service that could only be used
on their own devices.
This might sound limiting at first, but at the time it enabled individuals to keep in
contact 24/7, even while on the move, and was the first sign of the mobile-first world
of communication that we know today.
As businesses began purchasing Blackberries for employees in their millions, the network
effect took hold as consumers didn’t want to miss out on what was effectively an early
form of social media.
The devices became glued to the hands of office workers everywhere, so much that they were
referred to as Crackberries, for their addictive nature.
Wising up to their appeal with younger tech users, Blackberry started adopting catchier
names, with the likes of the Pearl, Curve and Bold serving as more memorable and just
cooler sounding.
Plus the price point of some of these phones sitting at under $100 made them affordable
for nearly everyone.
By 2009, 20% of all smartphones worldwide were Blackberries, and rival company Google
were so desperate for a slice of the success that they devised a prototype that was mocked
for being a Blackberry lookalike: the Google Sooner.
Even the newly appointed President of the United States, Barack Obama, insisted on keeping
his Blackberry while in office, something his staff tried to dissuade him from in order
to protect the privacy of his data.
So what’s happened to Blackberry in the last ten years that’s sent the devices’
market share all the way down to zero?
Well the most obvious reason is the huge success of Android and Apple smartphones.
The iPhone made its debut in 2007 and Android systems just a year later.
But what set these phones apart was their focus on the everyday, leisure consumer, not
the corporate world.
From an early stage, the likes of Apple, Samsung and Google could see that phones were
becoming multimedia hubs that could do everything, like holding a tv, games console and MP3 player
in your hand at the same time.
Unfortunately Blackberry continued to emphasise its messaging capabilities, refusing to follow
the tracks of its rivals.
Attributes like security and keyboard use were not top of consumers’ agenda
And by the time the Blackberry Touch was launched in 2011, the company’s first full touch
screen phone, Android and Apple were already several iterations in, and left too much ground
to make up in their bid to make the most user friendly device.
In a similar vain, the Blackberry Operating System, revamped as Blackberry 10, was not
very accommodating to third party app developers, unlike Apple and Google who welcomed them,
making the choice of apps available to Blackberry users severely limited.
Sure enough, as consumers turned away from their Blackberrys, the appeal of BBM fell
sharply too
A complete three day outage of the messaging service in 2011, thanks to a faulty router,
didn’t help its reputation And`in the space of just 4 years, Blackberry’s
market share had fallen from 20% to less than 1% as the company seriously struggled to shift
the units from store shelves.
As a result of the nosedive in sales, Blackberry produced the Priv that could run Android,
But the firm’s continued faltering revenue led to the end of production of its own phones
altogether in 2016, agreeing for third parties to design, manufacture and sell their own
(under the Blackberry brand)
The major licensees were BB Merah Putih for Indonesia and TCL Communication for most other
parts of the world, But these revivals failed to have any significant
impact, with the licence passed on to Texas start-up Onward Mobility in 2020.
Most people are highly doubtful that any life can be breathed back into Blackberry’s dying
brand, but maybe with its fresh leadership and refocus onto enterprise customers, the
impossible might just come true.
CLIP
And that’s how it happened.
Thanks for watching.