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A brief history of 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 started out creating pagers and handsets, but the first iteration of its smartphone, complete with an iconic keyboard, took shape in the early 2000s. Soon, BlackBerry phones were everywhere at one time, BlackBerry controlled 43% of the smartphone market in the US and 20% globally. But now the company doesn't make smartphones anymore. And in January 2022 it stopped supporting its phones entirely, essentially making blackberries obsolete.



 So what happened? In 1984, two Canadian engineering students, Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin formed research in motion. In 1989, the Canadian Telecom company Rogers contracted research in motion to work on its Mobotix network, a system specifically designed for messaging, giving the company a leg up as an early leader in mobile messaging. Fast forward to 1996, when the company created its first two way pager, its supported e-mail and could communicate with other devices on its network wirelessly, which was an innovation at the time. In 2002, the company unveiled its first cell phone.



 For the next few years it improved on that design, gradually adding features like a color display, Wi-Fi, and a built-in camera. BlackBerry figured out a way to make its phone indispensable to the wealthy and powerful, and having it really meant something about who you are as a person. It was a status symbol, and that's where we got that name. blackberry people were almost addicted to it and addicted to that feeling of always being connected. 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. And there was one other beloved feature, BlackBerry Messenger.


 The FBI messaging service was a key component of BlackBerry success as well because they figured out really early on that people wanted to have an instant connection to people they wanted to be able to message back and forth without limits and being able to BM also added you to that really 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. At that point, BlackBerry was just dominating the US market. And the company didn't yet see the iPhone as a big threat. The problem with them is really sort of in the bottom 40 there. It's this stuff right here. 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.



 The iPhone was something consumers had never seen before. The iPhone was a full touchscreen device and there 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.


 Research in Motion released a BlackBerry flip phone in 2008, quickly followed by the BlackBerry Storm, its first touch screen device. The storm was trashed by critics, who called it a definite let down because of the phone sluggish performance and bugginess. But BlackBerry phones still continued to sell for a few reasons. The iPhone was expensive and exclusive to AT&T until 2011, forcing customers in the US to either switch providers or pick a different phone. And very simply, people just didn't want to give up their keyboards. So for a while BlackBerry was fine, but the company underestimated how quickly the smartphone market was changing. There was a new updated iPhone every year and other smart phones like the Motorola.


 Roy began to hit shelves. It tried to keep up. It rolled out new innovative devices like the Playbook, tablet, and torch, but the devices were not well received. The playbook even shipped without an e-mail app, which to a business minded customer base made it useless. BlackBerry's death rattle came in June 2010 with the release of the iPhone 4 soon after, Apple's phone sales surpassed BlackBerry for the second time, but this time they stayed. There BlackBerry was slow to change. This company ethos was built around designing a great product that just worked and iterating on its very slowly. To that end they would add small features over time, but they weren't shooting for big sweeping changes that would shock and delight consumers. The phones missed out on a bunch of features that appeal to consumers like high quality front and back cameras, research and motions. Global market share began a downward spiral going from 20% in 2009 to less than 5% by the end of 2012.  In 2013 research in motion officially changed its name to BlackBerry that same year it finally released its spec competitive touch screen phone, but it was just too late at this point. People were locked in to either iPhone or Android. More than 432 million smartphones sold worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2016. But only about 200,000 of those were BlackBerry devices which officially made BlackBerry smartphone market share 0% and in 2016 Chinese consumer electronic company TCL essentially 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, but the phones lived on sort of. Introducing the new BlackBerry Classic with more power and control than ever before. 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 key two was released in 2018 and it might be the last. The BlackBerry 5G slated for release in 2021, never appeared, and in December 2021, the company announced 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 cyber security software. And despite their downfall, these iconic phones will always be bricks in the foundation of smartphone history.



 

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