Who is the customer: What killed the Blackberry was that it was too good for its clients. Its clients misused the device and Blackberry failed to adapt to a changing paradigm. First, let's be clear the users were not the clients, the corporations were the clients and they deployed the devices throughout their workforce. Once Blackberry dominated the corporate world it failed to understand that new customers (i.e. not corporations) would have different needs.
The forward-thinking of Blackberry: In 1995 on my way to Singapore I spent a few months in New York City working for CIBC, getting to know the team, we all had pagers then. A few months later returning to the city I see everyone playing with their two-way pagers (made by Blackberry), it was a game changer and a great time waster! But in Asia mobile phones were already ubiquitous and I never looked back. They used superior technology than what was in the US because of the US mobile phone cartel and they worked everywhere. They were so good that one day, I got a call from my boss, he was in Shanghai and I was in a London taxi on my way to the city... we cover the issues we both needed in the space of a 10-minute call. These were the days of the fax machine, pre-email.
Who is the client: On my return to Montreal, in 2002 I was handed my first Blackberry (black and white screen, etc), no phone. A few months later, my first Blackberry with a phone function was delivered to my desk. To give you a sense, from 1995 to 1999 I worked exclusively with a phone and fax, and it worked fine! Emails were introduced and the fax went from a few hundred pages a week to nothing in the space of 3 months. It was that quick.
Blackberry client is my employer, not me: So during the financial crisis of 2008, across the corporate finance world, HR developed a new trick to fire bank employees at a low cost, look at the employees' Blackberry datastream on their corporate-issued Blackberry and "fire them for cause" if they found anything...and the list of prohibited things was very long. It was a neat HR trick that worked for a few months. That is until the bankers got wind of this firing trick, and simply acquired a second, private, phone.
Blackberry's lack of vision: So like everyone else in my office, in late 2009 I acquired an iPhone to supplement my corporate-issued Blackberry. I got the phone for privacy, see above, and also because of Blackberry's terrible web surfing application. Within a few weeks of getting my iPhone, Bell Canada, my personal phone provider, introduced attractively priced data plans. Although I could not install my office email onto my iPhone I could for up to 30 days forward my emails to my personal phone (it only worked for a few months...after that they changed the system so that you could only forward to internal addresses).
Know your clients: Within six months of owning my iPhone, my Blackberry would sit in my home office in the evening and on weekends. I was still reachable by those who counted (my boss had my phone number). Virtually everyone on my trading floor had a second private phone. We all figured out (after reading an enlighting article in the Wall Street Journal), that your Blackberry could be used against you since they sold servers to banks, which gave banks total access to your phone use and data. When I left my bank in 2011, my Blackberry was hardly ever used, I almost never carried it with me. I know that the day I left, my Blackberry was in my desk and was out of juice. I had not noticed... and the device's battery was good for a month.
What killed the Blackberry was the applications: No one saw that one coming, not even Apple, who was surprised by the explosion in the number of applications. It should be noted that most bankers used the Blackberry phone till the very end because it was very secure, and when communication security is important that's a good thing. Eventually, blackberry introduced applications but with so many different models it was simply of no interest to app developers. Moreover, the vast majority of corporate Blackberrys were locked. Applications were the Blackberry killer, and there was no out for them. The myriad of models made platform development almost impossible when Android and Apple had one platform each. The founders were also bloodyminded and would not change and they got distracted towards other endeavors.
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