Sweet dreams BlackBerry

Early in my career, I worked for a company whose name was a synonym for mobile phones: Nokia. (I know, it seems like a bait-and-switch with that headline, but I’ll get there.) Around the time I was workingthere, the company was a source of national pride for Finland. The company that had started out as a pulp mill and maker of rubber boots in the 19th century became a huge hit, worldwide:

At its peak in 2000, during the telecoms bubble, Nokia accounted for 4% of the country's GDP, 21% of total exports, and 70% of the Helsinki Stock Exchange market capital.

Nothing lasts forever. As Nokia dominated the market, there was the rise of another early mobile phone giant: BlackBerry (or as executives addicted to its constant accessibility from anywhere called it, Crackberry). In its heyday, it owned about half of the market for all cellphones in the USA and 20 percent of all cellphones globally. US President Barack Obama insisted on having his BlackBerry at his inauguration in 2009.

What explained BlackBerry’s rise to the top? It combined so many smartphone features in one device that we take for granted today: “email, SMS, phone, a web browser, and a big beautiful (for the time) screen.” It offered reliable access to corporate email/calendar/contacts, a long battery life, password-less access, and end-to-end security from hardware to the application. As BlackBerry’s Executive Chairman and CEO John Chen pointed out in a blog post this month, even as fierce smartphone competition closed in, “BlackBerry continued to lead with devices designed to be the most advanced, the most user-friendly, and the most secure that money could buy.”

Nothing lasts forever. Apple created the first touchscreen smartphone. BlackBerry made a bad bet that people would continue to love the tactile feel of texting with buttons. Even worse, BlackBerry hugely underestimated the potential of the app market – or the ability of developers to build apps to make their smartphone more useful. It was incredibly difficult to build apps on BlackBerry. In 2008, they had 80 million users, but there were only a handful of applications you could install. There were a few games and business-related related apps, but that was it. Meanwhile, Apple and Android developers built out huge ecosystems with apps for anything you could imagine.

This week, it became official: the era of the BlackBerry classic smartphone is over, as the company ended support for its old BB10 platform or BlackBerry OS platform. "We have been holding off on decommissioning the BlackBerry service out of loyalty to our customers for a long time," CEO John Chen said in a blog post published today. "So, it stirs mixed emotions today, as I write this ... telling you that era has finally come to a close."

That said, BlackBerry is still very much a big player in the tech scene. Way back in 2010, BlackBerry acquired the QNX OS for embedded systems. Today, that technology is commonly used in a range of cars, in IoT and cybersecurity.

When we think of companies pivoting, we naturally imagine startups and startup culture. But as companies scale up, they still need to be able to pivot and adjust at times. The world changes. The ones that stick around have a culture of changing with it… even if some of your old customers no longer pick up the phone. And that’s the recurrent pattern.