How Apple Beat BlackBerry

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If you were in a businessperson in the early 2000s, then you almost certainly had a BlackBerry. A smartphone created by Research In Motion, or RIM, known for its email and internet functionality, secure encryption, and satisfying keyboard. There were tens of millions of BlackBerry users by the mid 2000s, making RIM one of the top players in the smartphone market. But despite their ubiquity, BlackBerry devices all but disappeared about five years after iPhone. So how was Apple, a company with no smartphone experience, able to beat RIM, who’d pioneered the industry? Well, the first issue, turned out to be BlackBerry’s initial success.

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00:00 Intro
01:15 Part 1: Suffering From Success
05:47 Part 2: Challenge Your Preconceptions
12:08 Part 3: A Battle For The Future of Smartphones
17:52 Part 4: Software Make A Fast Machine Slow
21:57 Part 5: Staying At The Top Is Difficult

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Music by Bensound
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[codycast]

The craziest part of the blackberry story is just how fast they went from massively dominant to nearly nothing.

[Macusercom]

RIM and other phone manufacturers were basically customers of network carriers. Apple changed that and made network carriers their customers

[jmtradbr]

It's kinda crazy that only Google took the iPhone seriously at the time. All the others only tried to do something after the iPhone success.

[thecapone]

Apple Explained, I am LOVING these longer format videos!!

[Decadent_ambience]

As a former employee, I recall management telling us to not worry about the first iPhone or the competition. Heinz, the following CEO didn’t have much vision for the company either and I recall him visiting for a 30-40 min to our office for a short town hall meeting. Afterwards, he literally screeched out of the parking lot in his $300, 000+ Mercedes sports car like he has better places to be 😂

[cmlacosta]

Blackberry forgot that those "casual" users, mostly young generations, will eventually going to replace the "business" users. Investing in future users is the best strategy that Apple did...

[OClockRant]

It was RIM who killed RIM. I was talking to a director of RIM at the time and he refused that they need to release a test OS out to demonstrate how “revolutionized” their “upcoming” release was that will blow people’s mind. When they realize they will be missing the early fall release and likely to release it in December, which will completely miss the “make-it-or-break-it” Christmas season. He insisted that they don’t need to send out test devices because “consumers will wait for it because it is that good.” I asked him, “how would consumers know when NO ONE knows how good it is?” His brilliant response, “we’ve been telling people how good it is. So good it will be better than Apple.” When their BlackBerry 10 came out, NO ONE was buying because people have already purchased their phones because it was pretty much mid-December. Apple has already solved the security issues to make it as secure as BlackBerry. Their cash flow quickly dried up, and unsold products turn the entire product line nothing but liability.

[earthculture]

Ohh how i miss the early 2000s with all its technology and culture and fashion and music and so on and on and on and

[ornleifs]

A friend worked in the Banking industry and everybody had a Blackberry there but in about two or three years they gradually switched to iPhone and he was one of the first to switch cause his private phone was an iPhone and it was just such a superior experience.

[FasuloA]

I held on to BlackBerry as long as I could. When many of my friends were switching to IPhone I got a storm, but it was a pretty awful experience. Switched over at the 3GS and never went back to anything else.

[mikerichardson]

Didn't even mention the best feature of a Blackberry that being BBM. Remember back then SMS wasn't unlimited you had to pay extra for more texts. With BBM you could message any other blackberry anywhere in the world for free.

[ferranss]

I still remember that in the 2010 decade Blackberry servers fell several times, so BB users weren't able to use their devices. People started to be disappointed with the platform and a system that didn't offer what both iOS and Android offered.

[Lord_of_The_World]

I would love to have my Blackberry Passport again. Best smartphone experience from a single device

[kierenmoore]

I loved my Blackberry. Perhaps the best thing about it, was that you could totally type a message without looking at it, due to the physical/tactile buttons … 😊

[HarrisonBorbarrison]

Next, can you explain Apple's relationship with mkv, webm, and AV1?

[bobimbordino]

Blackberry had potential if they just read the market right & made phones for both businesses & casual users in 2009/10. They would've been as big as samsung & apple by now.

[freddiefox.]

RIM still made around $97 billion revenue in ten years. That's impressive. But they didn't plan ahead. In the end, they sold Blackberries cheaply, so school kids and teens were running about with them, but then the social media companies stopped making apps for the dwindling Blackberry market, focussing instead on apps for iOS, Android, and in the 2010s - Windows phone. Without that app support, in a world where social media had replaced basic email and text messaging, that was the final nail for Blackberry.

[MattOliva]

2:28 I may be incorrect, but I believe Motorola had a two way pager with a full keyboard, and it was a clamshell model before RIM

[mk]

The reason Apple beat Blackberry and everyone else was that everyone knew Apple as the best company, the biggest name with the best products and then get amazed at how good and satisfying the product was.

[elem]

I love your well researched information as well as your narration