BlackBerry has at last fallen to a rounded 0.0% share among smartphone operating systems, including iOS, Android, and Windows 10 Mobile, following an over seven year decline from its peak market share of approximately 20% in 2009, according to the latest quarterly data from research firm Gartner.
I remember the BlackBerry co-CEOs saying they weren’t worried at all about the release of the iPhone. Idiots.
I can’t help but hear Dean Wormer reciting that headline.
When the iPhone was released, Steve Jobs said they would ecstatic if it achieved a 1% share of the global market for phones. Was he an idiot? He was certainly wildly wrong. So were the folks at Blackberry.
The fact is that nobody really knew that the future would turn out the way it did. Blackberry had good reason to think that the physical keyboard was a critical feature. Message volumes were growing exponentially at that time–how could a user keep up without a physical keyboard?
BTW, we now know that the iPhones that Jobs demonstrated at the intro were incredibly unstable. It was a miracle that he didn’t have multiple crashes and lockups during the demo. Perhaps the Blackberry folks had some corporate intelligence on that? If so, you could forgive them for waiting for the iPhone to flop when it got into customers’ hands.
Success of the iPhone was far from a sure thing when that comment was made. It is disingenuous to use hindsight to label them idiots.
Added insult: Windows Phone beating them at 0.3%
Which is stunning. You’d think a trace of brand loyalty by a sliver of prior BB users would be enough to beat out WinPhone, which NEVER had a following of any kind.
The goal was for year one, at a time when the phone was slated for release in only the U.S. with what was no better than the third place carrier at the time.
Apple could, in fact, be sure that they’d be able to achieve what they were promising with the iPhone. All the code worked, it just wasn’t entirely stable. Even if you have corporate intelligence that the development versions of a new product aren’t fully stable, you shouldn’t base any predictions or expectations off of that. Instability during development is perfectly normal and should be expected.
In reality, there were actually tons of people who saw the first iPhone at its release and could see it as the groundbreaking device that it was. That is why the comments at the time from the BlackBerry co-CEOs and Steve Ballmer were laughed at then, and are still laughed at today.
Also, the BlackBerry co-CEOs were actually incredulous that Apple could achieve what they did with the iPhone. They couldn’t believe that such a large screen was possible without running the battery down in just a few minutes. They didn’t believe it was possible to run a full desktop-class web browser on a mobile SOC. They never seriously stopped to wonder “…but what if it is possible? Then what do we do?” Instead they sat back and rested on their laurels, and by the time they realized how serious the threat was, it was too late.
In contrast, Google could see how groundbreaking the iPhone was, and they immediately re-tooled their Android project from being a Blackberry clone to being an iPhone clone. This certainly added at least several months of delay (Android didn’t come out until a year after the iPhone), but it was clearly the right thing to do. Note that at release Android still had considerable vestiges of its Blackberry clone origins, like dependance on a physical keyboard for input, and it took them many releases to incrementally ditch its remaining Blackberry-ness and copy the iPhone’s features, but they knew right away that that was the true end goal.
I think Google knew.
BlackBerry was caught is classic resting on it’s current breadwinner, just like Kodak inventing digital cameras but didn’t pursue it in the early 90s!
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Where’s Alicia Keys when they need her?
Oh that’s right, she’s starring in an Apple Music TV show.