A Berry Gone Sour: The Demise of RIM and BlackBerry


Hey, remember BlackBerry?

In this day and age, it's basically the smartphone equivalent of asking about digital watches or portable CD players. So it may be hard to remember that less than a decade ago, BlackBerry phones were at the technological forefront, a staple of the busy, the important, and the with-it. People joked about their BlackBerry addictions to the point where "CrackBerry" was Webster Dictionary's 2006 Word of the Year. In 2009, Fortune magazine named RIM, the makers of BlackBerry, as the fastest growing company in the world.

Today, you may still know a BlackBerry user, but it's probably that eccentric friend who won't throw away their video cassettes in case the VCR makes a comeback.

Have you ever wondered what happened?

Probably not. But hey, now that I brought it up, aren't you curious?

RIM's 1999 BlackBerry was revolutionary. In a time when cellphones weren't good for much beyond making calls, here was a palm-sized PDA that could send and receive e-mails from anywhere. The network was secure, the battery lasted forever, and the little QWERTY keyboard meant you could tap out a message with nearly the efficiency of typing on a computer.

For a while, everything was going right for RIM. What happened? In a word, people.

CEOs Mark Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie built a tech giant, but sadly they suffered from what is sometimes called "Founder's syndrome." Having scaled their way to the peak of the mountain, they failed to remember that landscapes change—especially in the fast-changing world of handheld electronics, where people on average replace their phones every two years.

On one hand, with hindsight on our side, it's easy to condemn business leaders for failing to divine the future. On the other hand, RIM's success caused Lazaridis and Balsillie to double down and stick their heads so far in the sand that their comments now make for surreal reading.

When PDAs in Asia began to offer color screens, Lazaridis insisted it was an impractical fad. "Do I need to read my e-mail in color?" he's reported to have said.

"Cameraphones will be rejected by corporate users," he stated in 2003.

In 2007, when Apple introduced a little gadget they were working on called an iPhone, Balsillie dismissed it as, "kind of one more entrant into an already very busy space with lots of choice for consumers … But in terms of a sort of a sea-change for BlackBerry, I would think that's overstating it."

Maybe in another company, someone might have stepped forward and delivered a wakeup call. But Lazaridis was notorious for only hiring people who thought like him. Lazaridis and Balsillie continued to insist their practical, workmanlike product had an impossible-to-beat foothold among businesspeople. How could a phone that wasted battery life on shiny new features elbow in on their territory? Who would tolerate the less user-friendly touchscreen keyboard of an iPhone?

"The most exciting mobile trend is full Qwerty keyboards," Lazaridis said in 2008, of a feature they'd been offering for literally nine years. "I'm sorry, it really is. I'm not making this up."

The public disagreed. The public disagreed pretty hard, as it turned out. That oh-so exciting keyboard feature became a shackle, cutting possible screen space in half and severely limiting what else the BlackBerry could offer. As more and more average consumers were enticed into the world of smartphones by the bells and whistles of the new generation, it altered the very definition of what a phone was supposed to be.

By the time even Lazaridis and Balsillie could no longer deny that change was needed, it was too late: they'd lost their edge, their voice of authority. When they finally started to offer their own touchscreens, it came with a feeling of sweaty desperation—and amazingly, their attempt at an iPad competitor didn't even offer e-email.

At its peak, BlackBerry stock was worth $230 a share. These days, it hovers around $10. You would probably be better off using that money to buy actual blackberries, which are delicious, full of antioxidants, and much less vulnerable to corporate hubris.


Check out Robb’s new book and more 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo...
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a...
Read more

The Top One Quality of True Leaders

Image
“So, what's up with the pile of words?” you ask. This is part of an experiment we conducted earlier this year on how to be the perfect leader. Sooner or later, most of us wind up in a position of some power, whether it’s running a cub scout den or a girl scout troop, heading up a committee at church or your job, or residing over your flamenco dance group or your flamingo lawn ornament club. And when you nobly accepted the challenge of being in charge, your brain released a little shot of cortisol, the stress hormone. In your moment of panic, you made the executive decision to discover the secret to being a good leader. If you were like me, you went down to your local bookstore and perused the aisles looking for books on leadership. After all, you wanted to be the best president the flamingo lawn ornament club had ever known, recognizing a club needs to be more than really swanky pink shirts. In my case, the bookstore anticipated my arrival and had at the ready a slew of...
Read more