The BlackBerry kept growing after the iPhone arrived, until it suddenly stopped
Headlines called the 2007 iPhone a BlackBerry killer, yet BlackBerry kept adding users for years and still ran 43 percent of American smartphones in early 2010. Six years later its share there had fallen below one percent. Its maker, a Canadian firm called Research In Motion, now sells security software rather than phones.
Research In Motion was founded in 1984 and spent its first decade on wireless data gear for the Mobitex network, even winning a technical Emmy in 1994. Its 1996 Interactive Pager was the first two-way messaging pager, and in 1997 BellSouth agreed a 70 million dollar deal for 100,000 of the soap-bar-sized devices. The BlackBerry 850 followed in 1999, named because its keys looked like the little bumps on the fruit, and it could receive push email from corporate servers. Encryption made the line a favourite of governments and businesses, and the first BlackBerry smartphone arrived in 2000.
Consumer models such as the camera-equipped Pearl broadened the appeal. In the United States users peaked at almost 22 million in September 2010, and worldwide the company had 79 million users by December 2012. In 2010 it was worth more than Adidas.
The decline came from several directions at once. Developers wrote apps for Apple and Android first, reviewers called the hardware and software dated, and even corporate customers began letting staff bring their own phones. Android overtook BlackBerry's American installed base within a single year, and the iPhone passed it in April 2011. The PlayBook tablet, rushed out that year, sold poorly and forced a 485 million dollar write-down. Promoting next-generation BlackBerry 10 devices long before they were ready risked hurting sales of existing models, and a multi-day email outage in September 2011 struck just as Apple prepared to launch the iPhone 4S.
The share price fell 87 percent between 2010 and 2013. Under John Chen the company reinvented itself in cybersecurity software, released its last handset in 2018 and ended support for BlackBerry 10 in 2022.
Source: BlackBerry Limited
