The Painful Death of BlackBerry

this video was brought to you by us slight beam make beautiful slide presentations in no time get one free month by signing up at slab beam comm /youtube let me just say it blackberry was huge celebrities love those phones Kim Kardashian Katy Perry Justin Timberlake even Barack Obama used one for most of his two presidencies as it was considered safer than any other smartphone back then from its qwerty actual physical keyboard to real-time emails the blackberry was for many years the smartphone by choice the company sold millions and they were riding high and Blackberry did a lot of things right but they also did a lot of things wrong and now they're gone and the reasons why blackberry failed aren't exclusive to them so when one of the biggest home companies plummets to oblivion it's worth analyzing so we are going to cover the birth of blackberry it's fast growth and expansion they're tipping point and finally their demise so this is started forensics blackberry [Music] how BlackBerry was born blackberry was originally known as Research In Motion our I am and it had been around since 1984 REM was the brainchild of Canadians Mike Lazaridis and Douglas phrygian from the start areum's obsession was Wireless and their vision paid off early they were the first of many things protocol conversion mobile point-of-sale just a name field to help with growth REM hired Jim Balsillie in 1992 who eventually became co-ceo with Lazarus remember him he was critical in BlackBerry's success and their demise but let's get back to REM by 95 they drew enough attention from investors to fund their first wireless two-way paging system Wireless paging the idea was very enticing as Adam Adam Oh one of the main investors in the time recalled the idea of a wireless device to send and receive email was revolutionary it was like looking into the future and knowing that this idea just made too much sense for it not to happen and he was right prior to the IPO REM raised thirty million Canadian dollars whatever that means for the interactive pager a pager and a wireless network system which was released in 1996 one year later wireless for the corporate user magazine named it the top product of the year REM came up with the BlackBerry 850 pager and a complimentary server called the BlackBerry Enterprise Server which was a genius idea the server was exclusive to blackberry so it could push emails fast instantaneously fast now there was no need to wait while your computer downloaded all the emails communication became instant and businesses of course loved it REM aimed at the corporate world and that was a good idea a great idea then they launched a blackberry 9:57 re M's first true blackberry though not a smartphone yet as it couldn't make calls but it did have the iconic QWERTY keyword a famous user interface through improvements in 2003 they released the BlackBerry 7 2 3 0 and it hit big it had all the technology that made black very successful and now it could actually make calls so much so that people consider this moment the birth of the BlackBerry smartphone pivotal in communications one of our IMS strongest selling points was safety with promises of tougher encryption processes they Gartner the attention of major businesses and governments alike during the next six years BlackBerry grasped the corporate world and didn't let go in fact the devices were so addicting they were called crack berries because corporations are healthy and wholesome hold on to this idea of corporations for later by the way the name BlackBerry comes from how the QWERTY keyboard resembled the actual blackberry fruit so now you have some random factoids for awkward silences as the years passed blackberry came more advanced they had cameras and new multimedia capabilities which made them appealing to a much bigger audience and a lot of people bought them growth and expansion the early 2000s might have been unkind to fashion but they were great for RM as its crew by 8 X users went from 500,000 or so in 2003 to 4.9 million in 2006 that means sales grew by 10x back then everybody in the corporate world had a blackberry but not only them teenagers as well you see combined with newer and better cameras the blackberry messaging service bbm was perfect for adolescents it could send images voice notes pictures locations create group chats and of course text does that sound familiar that's right they built West have before whatsapp was a thing that's how on point they were and they could have carried on with their greatness at its peak the BlackBerry brand sold around 50 million devices per year with annual sales of almost 20 billion its stock rocketed from two point $15 per share to a hundred and fifty dollars per share and celebrities craved BlackBerry's Kim Kardashian had three just in case one of them broke down pitbull wrapped about his bbm blowing with messages and before he joined Samsung JC was bragging about blackberry and its connectivity overseas but this is started forensics so not everything was fun and games though most of their models worked very well such as the pearl and the curve promising products like this storm never delivered the storm was the first model with a full touchscreen and no keyboard but since the OS was designed to work with a keyboard it didn't really grasp touchscreens very well it was sluggish and unresponsive and users hated it still even if their newest phone was failing sales piled up so there was no reason to be worried even when in 2007 Apple came up with a little device called the iPhone at first like most companies RM was not afraid of the world because it doesn't have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine yeah those words can bite back the tipping point let's give our am some credit even after the introduction of the iPhone and up until 2011 sales of the blackberry increased so they had reasons to be confident it was just that Apple had a different strategy and along with our M's mistakes it could prove deadly for blackberry let's go over those mistakes remember how blackberry was great for companies and teens alike companies loved connectivity and safety teens loved chatting with their friends but when was the last time you heard somebody anybody say I'm looking for the most secure phone in the world the average user didn't really focus on safety or security or privacy so while REM had the corporate market to itself they didn't have much else read this lethal quote by journalist Vlad Sawa focusing on the tens of millions of customers it already had blackberry missed out on the billions that were to come so who were these billions that we're to come well everybody else companies were finite and kids would get bored perhaps they might start using I don't know the iPhone and this was the second big mistake not listening to the market yeah Apple wasn't the only company competing at this point but they had a great idea and it was the complete opposite of what our I am preached you see blackberries were great for working people their batteries lasted long hours the data consumption was low their bandwidth Concepcion as well boring but efficient apps where the norm and Apple said screw that their abs consumed loads of memory their phones hugged up all the bandwidth and the first batteries lasted a day tops but their Navigator Safari was easy to use apps were visually stunning and plentiful and the device just looked great so people who weren't using their phones for business or didn't care about efficiency now had another option which leads us to the third mistake blackberry was obsessed with that QWERTY keyboard the physical keyboard it's great for emails but it's not great for pretty much anything else and they didn't venture into a full touchscreen until it was too late but it's not just about keyboards it's about everything lesser it is focused on limits size portability bandwidth battery everything had to be limited for efficiency well it turned out that it was too limited the OS was too restrictive for app developers for the market it was limited in fact most apps were stripped-down versions of their Android or iOS counterparts and they just didn't work properly the OS itself was also hard to update but ironically updating it to make it more open to the market meant possibly losing some of the valued corporate customers because of security concerns REM took pride and safety until bbm crashed for four days straight and REM didn't say a word about it until the third day and then there was that unauthorized spyware infection to 150,000 vac berry users in the United Arab Emirates and other scandals so with this bad press blackberry was losing their identity and still Lazar is in battle single rejected switching to Android or iOS or even you know the Windows operating system nor did they open bbm to competing for operating systems when they have the chance until whatsapp showed up and killed it remember how whatsapp sold for 19 billion yeah it's clear that their mindset was another reason for the shortcomings though they were co-ceos balsille and lesser it is sometimes didn't see eye to eye many blame this dynamic as the reason for their latest OS BlackBerry's 10 delayed launch so much that it was no longer competitive our i''m had the chance to innovate they had great ideas and all they had to do was break away from the suit-and-tie but they didn't again they were too confident and too conservative a deadly combination in this tech world here's another interesting quote from Bozzio we are very poorly diversified portfolio yeah there goes to the moon or it crashes to earth but it's making it to the moon pretty well so we'll stick with it ouch the demise and turn around people didn't want blackberries anymore and that hit sales hard they went from twenty billion dollars in sales in 2011 to just half of that two years later and it continued to fall Apple and Android stormed the scene manufacturers such as HTC Samsung and Motorola were willing to provide devices for them yet nobody wanted to work with blackberry or perhaps it was the other way around it was so obvious that change had to happen so in 2012 after three decades both CEOs stepped down and Thorsen hands took over but guess what he said we believe that blackberry can not succeed if we tried to be everybody's darling and all things to all people therefore we plan to build on our strengths as strengths that was well the business world and they learned anything plus it's not like their efforts were enough new phones like the c30 we're just okay their long-awaited BlackBerry OS was just okay but nothing amazed us like it did in the past nothing amazed us like the stuff that Google and Apple we're doing so just one of year later Heinz was gone then came John Chen he was a realist the probe was their last effort it was Android based sleek and very safe but it failed and after this failure Chen decided blackberry would stop making phones and sold the manufacturing license to other companies massive layoffs ensued the company's value plummeted with stock now trading at around $5 and the BlackBerry logo survives only in a handful of devices sold mostly in Asia blackberry as we knew it was dead is that the end of the story well no Chen embraces BlackBerry's safety obsession but now as a software company and with this new direction revenue has slowly increased in the past couple of years so perhaps they'll make it for now all that we can say is that blackberry was the undisputable boss but technology evolves everyday and they weren't willing to go the flow which forced them to the bottom where now they must fight their way back up [Music]

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Keywords: slidebean, caya slidebean, startup forensics, startup company, research in motion, research in motion blackberry, research in motion limited, startup mistakes, startup mistakes to avoid, business startup stories, business startup mistakes, caya, research in motion the mobile os platform war, why did blackberry fail, what happened to blackberry, death of blackberry, blackberry vs iphone, iphone vs blackberry, startup stories, what happened to blackberry phones, company forensics

Id: -R89vCHuoo4

Length: 11min 55sec (715 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 12 2019