After the Storm, BlackBerry prepared for the future by buying QNX, a software company founded by two more Waterloo grads
BlackBerry’s technology evolved cautiously, with what Lazaridis called “managed evolution,” a theory by which new models were iterations of the previous ones. The 6200 series, arguably the definitive BlackBerries, were the company’s first phones in 2003. In 2004 RIM began to make its way into the consumer market with its first non-QWERTY device, the 7100, which put two letters to a button and figured out your prose with an intuitive predictive-type system. In 2006, BlackBerry wrapped all the developments up in one product with the Pearl, which New York Times tech columnist David Pogue called the “sweet-spot champion:” good build, good screen, good battery, good UX, all the corporate features it had developed plus the geegaws that sold phones to consumers.
You can apply the law of attraction here as a fun tool. If you attract creativity, it will come to you. Use the power of intention to be creative. Your mind’s magical selective perception will make it impossible for you to be unoriginal or noncreative.
You can apply the law of attraction here as a fun tool. If you attract creativity, it will come to you. Use the power of intention to be creative. Your mind’s magical selective perception will make it impossible for you to be unoriginal or noncreative.
The company went public during the frothy IPO market of 1999, and by 2000 it had raised over a billion dollars through two offerings. During the 9/11 attacks, the company’s slow but steady network held up when cell and pager networks crashed.
By 1990 RIM had $1 million in annual revenues, largely by pivoting from the Budgie to more successful digital ad tech; one 1988 invention would even go on to win a technical Oscar. But what Lazaridis really wanted to create was a portable email gadget.
Three years later, to the day, BlackBerry’s co-CEOs resigned. The company had fallen from 20% to 5% of the global cellphone market, with its shipments down 41% year over year.
To fulfill his ambitions, he teamed up with a business mind, Jim Balsillie, a Toronto native with a Harvard MBA. RIM’s breakthrough came in 1999 with the 950, the first BlackBerry, a friendly name selected to take the edge off its nature as a work-delivery device. It ran for a couple weeks on one AA battery, all while pushing your email to you on the go. The first big customers were Merrill Lynch and Salomon Brothers.
On January 22, 2009, big news from the White House broke: incoming President Barack Obama could keep his BlackBerry. At the time, the manufacturer was slightly more popular than the new president, with 55% of the U.S. mobile phone market, compared to Obama’s 53% of the 2008 vote.
Instead, BlackBerry tried to iterate into touchscreens. The Storm had a touchscreen that was also one big button; the screen had to physically be pressed down to register a selected key. It was an unintuitive compromise between the tactile keyboards that defined the brand and the full screen of the future, unlikely to find an audience even if its buggy software hadn’t been rushed to market. In the first quarter of 2009, the Storm was behind the non-touchscreen BlackBerry Curve and the iPhone in sales; in the second quarter, it fell to sixth.
BlackBerry’s creator, Research in Motion (RIM), was launched from a Canadian strip mall in 1984 by 23-year-old Mike Lazaridis, an engineering prodigy and University of Waterloo graduate who dreamed of revolutionizing wireless communication. He started with the Budgie, a computer hooked up to a TV that took text input from a wireless remote and displayed it to passers-by in malls and storefronts. An old picture from the Budgie’s debut shows it reading out “I ATTRACT CUSTOMERS” in plain, Atari-like type. It turned out to not actually be great at attracting customers, but the interface — a solidly designed keyboard that beamed words to a screen — foreshadowed what RIM would become.
It is easy to write if you have your audience sitting in front of you, in your imagination. Just let your imaginary audience ask questions. Listen to their concerns and doubts, then incorporate the answers into your writing.
Apple’s creation was not inevitably a BlackBerry killer. Google, developing Android, scrapped QWERTY plans and went all-in on touchscreen. Tentative, iterating BlackBerry, didn’t. BlackBerries used minimal data and ran for days; the company didn’t think the iPhone, a data hog that wouldn’t make it 24 hours, had a big market. They also thought the even more conservative carriers would balk at the iPhone’s network load and Apple’s freeloading App Store. They had reason for concern — iPhones nearly broke AT