The Inevitable Downfall of the once-great Smartphone Company: The Blackberry Story

For years BlackBerry led the smartphone industry. At its peak in 2010, the company sold more than 50 million devices. They were the face of cutting-edge technology for it is one of the top wireless devices, the first to have email on mobile devices, and the QWERTY keyboard layout. They were owned by nearly every corporate worker in the country, but as of January 3rd, 2022 the company shut down and packed up their shop.

What causes a once world-renowned company to drop from 37% of the market share to .02% in the smartphone industry? Lack of Innovation.

This drop happened in the early summer of 2010, just as Apple released the Iphone 4. After this Blackberry never caught up. Obviously, Apple would be mentioned because after all, they are the face of every technology industry in the world. Three years prior to this when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone 1 in January 2007, Blackberry did not even acknowledge Apple as competition because apple was selling to the mass consumer, not the business and corporate users. Blackberry thought they were in two separate lanes, what they failed to realize was that Apple was in everyone’s lane, which is why Apple is such a successful company.

In 2008, BlackBerry released the “Storm”, their first touchscreen phone. It failed simply due to the phone being slow and lacking bad battery life. This was not a huge deal though since people still liked the keyboard and the BlackBerry’s were cheaper.

At this time BlackBerry was still increasing sales but so was Apple at a much faster rate. What Apple did that kept them ahead of every company was a new ground-breaking release of a new phone every year. BlackBerry tried but their products were simply not as good. Eventually, they released an arguably decent touchscreen in 2013, but by then Apple was so far ahead they couldn’t catch up. In 2016, they stopped making phones when TCL bought them out, now in early 2022, the company BlackBerry will be gone forever.

Even though BlackBerry was such a recognizable and iconic product that doesn’t always necessarily mean it will stay that way. It was once the foundation for smartphones and now it is nothing.

With every failure, there is a lesson to be learned. Blackberry was ahead of everyone at a point in time but they lacked futuristic thinking and the ability to innovate. They were ideological, they had plenty of opportunities to follow Apple’s innovative path but they chose to take a backseat and still sell the same products they were before Apple. They failed to implement many tools including touchscreen and app infrastructure. They thought what they were doing was enough, and they were wrong. The customer wanted these tools but BlackBerry did not want to provide these tools. The lesson to be learned here is that a business should always cater to the customer before themselves, if BlackBerry had done this they might still be #1 in the world.

It does not matter what you want, it matters what the customer wants.