BlackBerry's Rise and Fall: From 85 Million Users to 0.0 Percent

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In 2008 an incoming president fought his own security agencies to keep his phone. That phone was a BlackBerry, built by Research In Motion of Waterloo, Ontario, a company that began with two-way pagers on a rugged data network called Mobitex. This episode follows the device from the BlackBerry 850 of 1999, with its thumb keyboard and push email, to a peak of 85 million users and a spot in the dictionary under the word CrackBerry.

The same strengths that won over corporate IT departments left the company blind. While executives fought a patent suit, sparred with foreign governments over encryption, and dismissed the iPhone as a toy, the definition of a good phone changed under them. A global outage in October 2011 broke the promise of reliability, layoffs followed, and by the fourth quarter of 2016 its global smartphone share registered as 0.0 percent. What survives is a software and cybersecurity firm, and the push notification on every phone.

• The name came from Lexicon Branding, which thought the small oval keys looked like the drupelets of a blackberry.
• Barack Obama's visible attachment to his BlackBerry was valued at 25 to 50 million dollars in free advertising, and E.L. James wrote Fifty Shades of Grey on one with her thumbs.
• RIM paid 612.5 million dollars in 2006 to settle with patent holder NTP after a looming injunction threatened to shut down the entire US BlackBerry network.
• The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and India threatened bans over encrypted traffic, while 2013 leaks showed the NSA and GCHQ had already compromised BlackBerry data.
• In 2013 the company cut 4,500 jobs, about 40 percent of its staff, and in January 2022 it switched off the legacy services that powered the classic devices.