Jim Balsille was recently had a short interview with Malcolm Gladwell, which provides useful context:

https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history

Jim foresaw the end of RIMs device business in 2011 but was unable to convince the board to separate the then successful blackberry messenger business which could have been very successful on its own. The board was unwilling as it would surely kill the device business -- which ended up dying anyway, along with blackberry messenger.

Matthias, you give a textbook example of why the innovator's dilemma is a thing.  Thank you for that great history lesson from an insider's perspective.

They failed because you left.  :)

I was a co-op student there in 2006 the summer before the iphone came out. I still remember the day I had a conversation with a higher up. I was telling him how excited I'll be for the day that portable cameras, mp3 players, and GPS will be obsolete because the BlackBerry will do them all instead. I was told in clear terms that this was impossible. Mobile cameras would never be good enough. GPS used too much battery. Music would always work better on an iPod type device.

I think about that conversation a lot.

Matthias hits it out of the park again! Loved the in depth history lesson from an engineer who's clearly thought this through :)

I loved the Blackberry. I was the senior IT guy at a Fortune 200 company when they came out and I quickly was responsible for provisioning literally thousands of them for company staff. From an Enterprise perspective, Blackberries totally rocked - extremely fine grained security setting, group policies to restrict web browsing and non-business uses, PTT "radio" function to keep my support staff in touch and best of all remote provisioning. From my Boomer/computer engineer perspective, I adored the physical keyboard. That said, once the iPhone came out, Blackberry dropped the ball entirely in my estimation. Within a week of the iPhone release, I had corporate executives clamoring for them to be tied into our enterprise systems. The modern smart phone race went on while Blackberry retained its largely corporate user base and they lost the thread of where the industry went. Sad.

One of the killer features on the iPhone keyboard was a capacitive touch screen instead of the previous resistive ones. Capacitive was hard to do well, and they pushed the tech a bit and therefor got an edge on everyone else at launch.

Really interesting. I started administering and owning blackberry servers in 2004... I had many of the units from the original "pager" - The battery life was... forever. The network worked... everywhere. I switched to the iPhone when the 3GS came out, whenever that was. I thought the blackberry OS was MUCH more sophisticated than iOS at the time... but iOS was pretty.

This has got to be one of the most thoughtful and well put together lessons on the tech industry. I greatly enjoyed watching, as I did using my last blackberry 81xx-something with all the keys and the lovely thumb trackball. BES, the RIM support team, and the documentation were always top notch! It was a pleasure to support.

Hello from the Munich team porting BBM to iOS and android :)

I still have a Blackberry 8100. My favorite was the 8220 Pearl Flip. I really enjoyed that story. 2007 was an interesting time when everyone was innovating and there were a ton of devices coming to market. Now all the phones are the same. I really miss that.

I was at Symbian, which failed around the same time, but for different reasons.  Like you, I sometimes think about what could have been done differently, but even with hindsight I think it was inevitable.  Once a small organisation grows with a success, it's always going to seem foolhardy to divert significant attention and resources away from that, and it's probably the correct business decision not to; you can't know that your research project will succeed, it's a massive gamble.  If you're the size of Apple, Google, Microsoft or Samsung you can afford to either acquire a promising company that's already done some/most of the research, or to fund multiple new research projects so that one of them has a chance of success (but see the counterexample of Windows Mobile!)

I joined the OS team at RIM in 2006 through an acquisition.  Nessus was a great OS and bugdisp worked extremely well (cheers Victor!), but it needed user mode threads (and a dynamic memory allocator!), and source level debugging.  I built a proof of concept for both but it never gained any traction - RIM was just too successful, having vanquished Palm, Microsoft, Motorola, Noikia .. management felt we were unstoppable.  I really do believe there was a path forward for Nessus to evolve to native mode applications, but the breakneck speed that RIM was growing at just blinded people to the upcoming threats.  I don't really blame them either - Barack Obama refused to give up his Blackberry,  the Queen of England was touring our factories.  We were on top of the world, but it wouldn't last.

I started in tech marketing X.25 hardware in 1985.  Man, those were the days.

I worked as a C-level strategy advisor at both Palm & Motorola just before the iPhone launched.   Palm was actually way ahead of everyone but IP issues massively delayed the release and killed them.   Gotta remember at the time that Apple was going nowhere before the iPhone - the iPod had been successful but it was just keeping the company relevant and there was no app store or ecosystem to speak of - that came, much much later, but Palm had all of the above, plus successful devices in the market.  Motorola was doomed all around, they were not interested in innovating or new tech, just replicating the StarTac success...   Interesting stuff.

I got my first Blackberry from my work in 2006 and that was my only phone device till 2016 when my work ended it and asked us to switch to bring-your-own-device. Thats when I switched to an iPhone. I think WhatsApp was the only thing I missed when I had the Blackberry. I don't remember if I did a lot of typing on the Blackberry but definitely didn't enjoy the touch keyboard on the iPhone. When 3rd party swipe keyboard came out, that is when I started typing more, and of course, now swipe is built-in and much better. I still have a hard time typing on the iPhone without swipe all these years later.

Thank you for this. I bought the Losing the Signal book from your recommendation have been enjoying reading it. The part that stuck out was a) Mike wasn't a software person so that limited his ability to contribute with the OS, apps and also perhaps he gave his less focus; and b) Mike seemed to be very conscious of his personal brand and I was surprised he ran the ads and marketing!

It's really cool to hear your Blackberry story.👍

Looks like your other channel was hacked.

Thank you for the history lesson. I am old enough to have gone through that period but had resisted on getting work emails on personal time so by the time I relented and was deciding on which device to buy, the IPhone 4 had won out. I had no experience with the physical keyboard so it was the sexier larger screen and web browsing ability that had won me over.

I was issued a storm in 2008 when I worked at UPS.  I really rather liked it.  Responsive.  Never had a problem with the touch screen.