You were once never more than six feet from a BlackBerry in London. Everyone was hooked on the devices, from company execs firing off emails in the back of taxis to schoolkids who couldn’t last five minutes without checking BBM. The lightning-fast speeds to exchange messages, coupled with a full, pocket-sized keyboard, ushered in a new era of being permanently online, where everyone communicated round the clock. If you didn’t have a BlackBerry you were simply backward, uncool, a philistine.
From around the turn of the century onwards, annual sales of BlackBerry phones saw near-exponential growth, and with it the world’s thirst to get their hands on the latest devices. The craze transformed Waterloo, BlackBerry’s Canadian headquarters, from a sleepy town home to a large Mennonite community who travelled by horse and refused to use electricity, to a tech powerhouse that was the gravitational centre of the global smartphone industry.
“It was the closest I’ll ever feel to being a rockstar,” said Craig Swann, a software developer who spent twelve years working for BlackBerry maker RIM.
“Seeing your work in the palm of everyone all the time was incredibly gratifying. I would get stopped on the street so people could see my newer phone, or in airports people would be excited to hear your worked for RIM, and everyone knew RIM.”
Such was BlackBerry’s grip on the smartphone market, that when Steve Jobs took to a stage in San Francisco to unveil the first iPhone in 2007, many company insiders simply shrugged their shoulders.
“I think it was a lot of disbelief that people would want an inferior product,” Swann told the Standard.
“The original iPhones had terrible batteries, dropped calls constantly, and were slow. BlackBerry was a better phone.”
But while the Apple lagged RIM in its technology, it had a secret weapon up its sleeve: the App Store. The move opened users up to thousands of new tools that had never been available on a smartphone. It meant, in effect, that Apple was outsourcing its iPhone innovation to hundreds of software businesses across the globe – developing new applications at a speed RIM struggled to emulate.
It was the closest I’ll ever feel to being a rockstar
By 2009, a year after the launch of the App Store, the keyboard-based BlackBerry and the touchscreen iPhone were at level pegging in global smartphone shipments, but in 2010, Apple edged ahead and Blackberry, to its shock, saw sales start to dip.
“It wasn’t until the App store took off that the writing was on the wall,” Fraser Gibbs, a former technical director at Blackberry, told the Standard.
“Of course folks were worried. Slowing sales brought budget cuts and hiring freezes which did cause a mood shift.
“But many were also puzzled. We were all keyboard addicts and didn’t understand the appeal. In the teams I worked with there was a lot of determination to keep going and fight back.”
And fight back it did. Blackberry unveiled its own touchscreen phone, the Storm, in 2011, and in 2013 began scrapping keyboards altogether. But it felt like a tacit admission that the iPhone’s design was the future. In any case, the Storm was a poor imitation, with hundreds of thousands of devices having to be recalled over faulty touch screen, while BlackBerry’s co-CEOs both resigned by 2012, and thousands of staff were laid off.
“I don’t know anyone who predicted a loss of market share,” Gibbs said.
“We built a business communications tool and the shift to a music/games/apps device is where BB really lost the market.
“It wasn’t a tech innovation issue but a realization of what the consumer market wanted out of a smartphone.”
Fast-forward to 2022, and Blackberry finally discontinued its support for its classic smartphones, marking the end of a 25-year history in the industry. Its dramatic rise and fall is chronicled in a new film, ‘BlackBerry’, which debuted in cinemas on Friday.
The film powerfully captures the thrill of being inside a tech firm growing at lightning speed, as well as the intense pressure on engineers to keep innovating at pace – though its storytelling is far from faithful to the facts.
“It left me a little angry as a lot was portrayed wrong,” Gibbs says.
Most of the tech discussions in the movie were nonsense. There was no big crack down on engineering, or fun.”
“What it got right is the energy to get the product working and out the door,” says Swann.
“The desire to have a perfectly engineered product that always worked.”
The BlackBerry engineering spirit lives on in Waterloo, which continues to be a leading tech hub in Canada. Ironically, the firm’s demise spawned a huge growth in tech startups in the city: such were the size of its severance payments, laid-off engineers had enough ready cash to launch their own ventures, some of which became unicorns in their own right. It’s also the home to big engineering bases for Google, Oracle, McAfee and others. But nothing compares to the excitement of the days of BB.
