When Mike Lazaridis founded with Douglas Fregin Research In Motion Limited (RIM) in 1984 In the small Canadian city of Waterloo, Ontario – with just over 100,000 inhabitants – I did not know that I was going to revolutionize the way we communicate today, I did not imagine that I was going to create one of the pioneers of the smartphones, BlackBerry, and that their success would lead to his company becoming a multinational with up to 17,000 employees in their primeor; Nor did he calculate that the exponential growth of that phone, its flagship product, was going to be so ephemeral that just over two decades after its launch, on January 4, it would completely say goodbye to the market.
The quantum computing enthusiast, who emigrated to Canada with his family from Turkey when he was five years old, started the company with the intention of developing wireless technology and achieved in his early years the creation of different advancements in this field based on Mobitex, an open systems interconnection protocol, which highlights various devices, including person locators or beepers. The successful development of these equipment attracted new investors and prompted the subsequent listing of the company on the New York Stock Exchange in 1997, as highlighted by the book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry.
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Only a year later they launched their first BlackBerry device: the BlackBerry 850, a revolutionary product that focused on allowing executives to answer emails more quickly and efficiently, something that until then could only be done through a computer. It was the first computer of its kind to include a full QWERTY keyboard, something that became the brand’s signature look and later its downfall with the rise of touchscreens.
This device was joined in the following years by the BlackBerry 957, 5810 and 6210, which integrated the option to make calls and provided support for Java applications, which added new functionalities, such as listening to music. With the 7270, the company also made a major leap to a color screen and Wi-Fi connection, and in the Pearl 8100 it finally incorporated a 1.3 megapixel rear camera, something that gave the team the characteristics of a smartphone.
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By the end of the first decade of 2000, BlackBerry – supported in the company’s operating system, the BlackBerry OS, and in the BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) software package – gained acceptance from a wide audience, standing out for its level. of security, that popularized it between world leaders, journalists and industralists. As well as its messaging application BlackBerry Messenger, with encryption features and the predecessor of other platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram, which provided users with the option of carrying out conversations by text message in a fluid way and also made the phrase ‘ give me your pin ‘, since each team had a code with which a contact request could be sent to another device of the brand in order to start chatting.
His recognition was so great that the former president of the United States Barack Obama, before positioning himself for his first term in 2009, declared himself a fan of these phones and he refused to replace it as his communication device. At that time, the American declared that “they would have to rip it out of his hands.”
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In that year, the company was at its peak, achieving 20 percent of the mobile market worldwide, according to IDC data; In the United States alone, the phone accounted for 40 percent of sales.
The beginning of the end
The decline came from the hand of Apple’s 2007 launch of iPhone. His smartphone left aside the physical keyboard to present a fully touch screen, something that at first was despised by Lazaridis, pointing out the high cost of the equipment and ensuring that this type of screen had already existed for some time.
The cell phone of Steve Jobs’ company was not only focused on a corporate customer, as RIM had pointed out from the beginning, but it was opening up to a broad market of individual consumers, through a larger application offering and better graphics. This added to Google’s bet via creating your Android operating system, in which other brands such as Samsung were leveraged to launch their smartphones.
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This led to the sustained growth that the company had so far collapsed since 2009, struggling to maintain the pace of innovation and development imposed by its competitors and in which the launch of the BlackBerry PlayBook, as an attempt to compete with the already popular iPads, which ultimately ended up being a commercial failure.
This led to the subsequent departure of Lazaridis and Fregin, who decided to found Quantum Valley Investments, a firm focused on supporting research on quantum physics and computing.
Faced with the adverse outlook, the company in 2013 it changed its name from RIM to BlackBerry Limited as a bet to relaunch their products, which finally failed to gain public recognition, due to the difficulty of the brand to reconnect with the tastes of users.
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By 2016, the Canadian company stepped aside and decided to stop making its own phones to license the brand and services to TCL Communication Technology Holdings Ltd., which continued to release BlackBerry devices until finally Your deal was exhausted on August 31, 2020, after no significant share of the smartphone market was achieved.
The final goodbye to the iconic cell phones was announced by John Chen, the executive director of BlackBerry, on January 4, who indicated that since that day all the devices with the operating systems 7.1, 10 or PlayBook OS 2.1 they will no longer be supported, so message service, data, and phone calls cannot be used reliably. The only brand devices that continue to operate are those with an Android operating system.
“Our customers’ fierce commitment to their BlackBerry devices still fills us with pride, even though we stopped making them years ago. We have long postponed the deactivation of the BlackBerry service out of loyalty to our customers, “said Chen, adding that”the era has finally come to an end”.
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The new bet
Amid the decline in its share of the smartphone market, BlackBerry decided to focus on other fronts and bet on becoming a cybersecurity software company. This was achieved after in 2019 it acquired for $ 1.4 billion Cylance, an American company founded in 2012, which was one of the first to apply artificial intelligence, algorithms and machine learning (machine learning) in computer security.
The commitment was to exploit that security attribute that made the brand’s phones have a great reception and a definitive turn to focus on the corporate market and not on the mass consumer market, in a sector that has had great growth in recent years and that handles quite promising projections such as cybersecurity. According to a report by Grand View Research, published in 2021, this segment is expected to register worldwide revenues for 372,000 million dollars in 2028, with annual growths close to 10.9 percent.
Our customers’ fierce commitment to their BlackBerry devices still fills us with pride, even though we stopped making them years ago
And BlackBerry’s new mission has been gaining ground, the Canadian company has positioned itself as a provider of unified security services for terminals, Internet of Things (IoT), secure remote accesses, systems for remote work, among others. With about 2,000 patents approved in the last year.
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Currently, according to company data, they offer protection to more than 500 million terminals worldwide, of which 195 million correspond to vehicles, being able to respond to 96 percent of the threats in the field of IoT. Likewise, it maintains operations in 30 countries around the world.
This projection has led them to have total revenues during the third quarter of 2021 of $ 184 millionThis is not a negligible figure, although it is still far from the growth projections expected by the company.
John Chen pointed out in an interview with Bloomberg in June last year that the company is focusing on expanding its sales force in order to gain more and more presence in the market, although this “sure is taking longer than I expected, but certainly you can see the progress, so we will be patient, “he said.
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The company’s recovery plan will continue, despite the chain of errors that almost led to bankruptcy. Meanwhile, BlackBerry will remain in the memory of some nostalgic people who will continue to remember it as the pioneer of cell phones as we know them today.
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MARÍA FERNANDA ARBELÁEZ M.
Tecnósfera Newsroom
Twitter: @mafearbelaezmen
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