The Rise and Fall of Blackberry

the word blackberry goes by many meanings in the technology community some seed is nothing more than a paperweight some seed is a smart phone for professionals because of its keyboard some seed is the first real smart phone and a growing number of people are most likely just as aware of what a blackberry is as they are with floppy disks and clipping to me though the BlackBerry represents an incredible idea for its time but unfortunately only for its time after all how could a tech company raise a twenty billion dollar net worth overnight and just as quickly drop to a zero percent market share that's the Enigma of blackberry in 1984 a small company in Waterloo Canada Research In Motion was formed by Mike Lazaridis in Douglas Reagan both engineering students with the intent of selling a product they called budgie which allowed for lines of text to be entered in a keyboard and then wirelessly displayed on a TV set the idea was that retailers would use the system to make advertisements unsurprisingly budgie ended up being a failure but it marked the start of a long series of experimental products like film editing equipment a barcode reader and electric toothbrush and even equipment to use the mobit X network or as we know it today first generation mobile data rims work with the mobit X network eventually led to some hardware that took advantage of it like a PCMCIA modem and eventually a pager for those who are unaware a pager is basically the simplest form of texting before texting was the thing they relied on wireless data networks like MOBA text to send text messages or in the case of rims interactive pager sent faxes text-to-speech messages on the phone and even emails through the information superhighway the more successful room 950 came out two years later and soon after the room 9:57 was a larger screen that began the iconic design for blackberry products have followed the name blackberry actually originated from the keyboard on this device the angled design of the keys which made it easier to type with your thumbs kind of look like the driplets of a blackberry free part of the success of blackberry was due to its widespread support from business workers and executives which was built through their guerilla marketing techniques taking a page from the AOL playbook rim would send teams to conferences and airports who would seek out people with heavy looking laptops and modems they would give the person a blackberry to try free for a month because of how many were being given out some used their free BlackBerry's for years didn't matter much however because once people got a free trial of the technology they were hooked and their word-of-mouth carried the brand the rest of the way into profitability the blackberry may have started out as the pager but the brand transitioned with the release of the BlackBerry 58 10 rooms first true smartphone of course you had to plug in a headset to make calls but by the BlackBerry 6710 audio hardware was included too with the introduction of a color screen in the 70-200 and a continually improving design the BlackBerry became closer and closer to what we noticed today for the longest time blackberry had been focused towards the business community and it had seen great success in that area being dubbed the CrackBerry because of how addicted people would become to their phones but just as Raymond transition from pagers to smartphones they started looking at introducing the BlackBerry to the general public the redesign introduction of a model name instead of a number in new included features on the blackberry pearl like a built-in camera and media playback demonstrated rims attempts to make the BlackBerry a cool item both the pearl and the curve released in 2007 rapidly increased sales of blackberry phones but another smartphone released that year marked a new threat to the BlackBerry brand the iPhone was radically different from the blackberries it competed with it had mobile data text messaging and phone calls but no keypad instead the face of the device was a touchscreen now this seems like an obvious move to you the nut just shows how popular the idea was after the iPhone the technology industry became obsessed with touch interfaces to the point where it's hard to find a smartphone today that doesn't have one despite its massive public attention les aristos skeptical of the iPhone after all the first time Apple it entered the cell phone market and he believes the cell networks wouldn't even be able to handle the device and for a while he was right for about two years after its release the iPhone was infamous for slow cellular data and dropped calls the culminated in a class action lawsuit against the company ribbon was confident with over 10 million users Apple's iPhone wouldn't offer too much competition still they went with the touchscreen idea and released the blackberry storm2 less than great reception it was panned for being glitchy slow and not even having support for Wi-Fi the BlackBerry Bold however which stuck to the traditional blackberry formula ended up doing very well bringing the company to its peak value in 2008 at 49 billion pounds still the rise of the iPhone and eventually Android was inevitable buy the iPhone 3GS Apple was beginning to L sell bike very devices it didn't help the de storm - which sought to patch all the issues consumers had with the storm released the same day as the Motorola Droid a phone with much more media hype following this rapid blossom market share rim decided to completely revamp the BlackBerry operating system acquiring smaller companies to rewrite the US and develop an interface for the first and only BlackBerry tablet the PlayBook I say only because the device was a total flop selling over the course of its lifetime two and a half million units a number the original iPad had surpassed within three months 2012 brought much-needed change to rim however from the departure of Lazzarini symbol Seeley to the introduction of forced in hinds who cut thousands of jobs to the delay of the promised new OS BlackBerry 10 2013 at blackberry tens release RIM also announced that it would be renamed to blackberry not really a huge deal I guess they were just taking a few cards from AOL and its quote unquote rebranding after incidents like a three-day service outage in 2009 however customer faith had eroded in blackberry to the point where many consumers had left for Android and iPhone it wouldn't be persuaded back following declined offers to sell the company later that year Heinz was replaced with the current blackberry CEO John Chen Chen has a history of turning around failing companies and some of the first changes he made to blackberry were to move focus back towards the professional fields for blackberry had originally been successful under Chen's leadership the company also released its first Android based phone the BlackBerry Prive in 2015 eventually ditching blackberry 10 entirely by early 2016 towards the end of the year bug berry announced that it would no longer be developing hardware in-house instead working on software for smartphones a BlackBerry phones are still produced by TCL the company is here a percent market share essentially means that Blackberry phones aren't likely to make a comeback and there you have it yet another story of how a company can pioneer in industry only to end up failing when they can't keep up with the market they created blackberry was a game changer when it came to getting the public to use smart phones but proved to move too slowly when change came from outside sources perhaps though it is an entirely blackberries fault after all when you have a product gaining four million users in one quarter it's hard to acknowledge that some comparatively crummy product released by a company with no experience in your industry is going to eclipse your success on less than a decade rim had taken steps to compete with the iPhone but overall they had underestimated the risk it posed perhaps at the blackberry storm have been given more developmental attention and had a more successful release we met all be watching this video on our new BlackBerry phones with the Apple iPhone being as much of a footnote in tech history as the new [Music]

Channel: The Science Elf

Views: 500,560

Keywords: blackberry, blackberry phone, rim, research in motion, smartphone, iphone, apple, android, motorolla, droid, pager, cell phone, cellphone, technology, computers, computer history

Id: v0ss6iWYkq8

Length: 7min 30sec (450 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 17 2017