Let's travel back to mid 2000s.The question What's your BBM pin was as common as asking your phone number. This was around the time when Blackberry dominated the smartphone market. After hurting our fingers on the Nokia's numeric keypads for years, the shift to blackberry's qwerty keypad was nothing short of iconic. It made texting and checking emails a thousand times easier. But how many people do you now see using Blackberry? The answer is perhaps 0. The company went from holding over 20% of the global smartphone market to almost zero in a few short years. How did this happen?
When Blackberry created it's first phone, it had a very specific goal in mind.It was to make the life of business professionals easier and it's marketing tactics were on-point. They used to go to business conferences and particularly look for people with bulky laptops and offered them the Blackberry free of cost as a trial for a month and if they liked it, they could buy it. (And boy! did people like it) Not only it was first hand-held qwerty keypad, but it also introduced push email so users could get email when they were sent instead of checking for them constantly. Few years down the line, Blackberry devices took over the corporate world and almost everyone had one. Soon there was certain coolness quotient attached to owning the phone.
Slowly they started flowing into the non-professional world. The brand targeted everyday users with various new features including the once beloved Blackberry messenger. Since this was only available on Blackberrys, it made you feel like you were a part of an exclusive club. Now here's why this was a game changer. Back in the day, the telecoms used to charge per every text message you sent. However BBM used internet data to transfer messages, just like WhatsApp. Back in the 2000s, this was quite revolutionary.Owning a Blackberry soon became a status symbol much like the iPhone is today. Thanks to BBM, which at one point had 85 million users, the brand was everywhere.
Everything seemed to be going really smoothly until one fateful day, Apple launched the iPhone.In 2007, when Steve Jobs revealed the first iphone, he actually showed examples of Blackberry phones and said Apple was getting rid of all the buttons and just giving people a giant screen. The iPhone was a new touch screen phone that had a web browser and an email feature and was potrayed as a computer in the palm of your hand.
Now, you would assume that this would be a wakeup call for the folks at Blackberry, but they weren't really concerned about Apple. They said iPhones would need really good internet and telecoms wouldn't be able to provide that. Second, people adored Blackberry's qwerty keypad and no touchscreen would be able to replace it.Third, they said that iPhone wasn't even catering to the corporate world.Well, they were absolutely wrong on all counts. From a global market share of 20% in 2009, it fell to just 1% in 4 years.
With the iPhone leading the way with technological innovation, android phones also began rising in popularity which gave users what the iPhone had, but at a lower cost. All of a sudden, Blackberry wasn't as exciting as before. So, what happened?
First and foremost, Blackberry wasn't able to realise that smartphone purchases would be driven by regular customers and they were hell-bent on focusing only on business professionals.So, while Blackberry was making it easier to check your emails, Apple and other android devices were adding better cameras, better screens and overall making your lives easier. People won't use their phone just for work. They use it for literally everything from watching Netflix to tracking their step-count to listening to a stranger ramble away on a podcast. Had Blackberry had this vision, who knows what it could've done.
Here's the second reason. Blackberry failed to understand the importance of the app ecosystem. Neither did it give developers any reason to make apps for Blackberry, nor did move to Android so that users could benefit from its plathora of apps. It eventually did, but it was too late by then.So here you are with your Blaackberry with limited set of apps while your friends have moved onto IOS and Android. Sure! You have your Blackberry messenger, but no one else has it so who are you going to speak to? If they had created an ecosystem where developers would be keen on making apps for Blackberry, who knows what it could've been!
And finally, the third reason, Complacency. Blackberry didn't make any leaps that would make people want to trade-in their old versions for a new one and stay within the company's fold. Unlike Android and IOS which improved year after year by leaps and bounds. Think about it, why do iPhone users trade-in their old iPhones for a newer version every couple of years? It's because Apple constantly keeps adding new features that improve the user experience.
Although Blackberry was looking at all the changes going on in the smartphone market it was like you know what? I'm fine! And that's what it came to be. Just fine. And fine isn't good enough. But you know what? It's not really a sob story, atleast financially. The company did so well in it's hay day that it had no debt and housed over 5 billion dollars in cash when they started running into trouble which in itself is a major success.