BlackBerry: From Push Email Pagers to QNX Software in Connected Cars

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BlackBerry began in 1984 in Waterloo, Ontario, as Research in Motion, a company building data products for packet switched wireless networks such as Mobitex. Its 1999 BlackBerry 850 pager, named because its keys resembled the drupelets of a blackberry, brought push email routed through the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, with encryption strong enough to win banks, corporations and governments. Consumer lines like the Pearl, Curve and Bold followed, and by 2010 the company was worth more than brands such as Adidas, MTV and Ben & Jerry's.

The 2007 iPhone changed the market, and the 2008 Storm, with a touchscreen that physically clicked, was a flop. Subscribers still peaked at almost 22 million in the U.S. in late 2010 and 80 million worldwide in 2012, even as developers moved to iOS and Android. Co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie struggled to agree, the PlayBook tablet shipped without native email, and the stock fell 87 percent from 2010 to 2013. A Fairfax buyout was dropped for a $1 billion investment, and CEO John S. Chen moved to Android with the Priv, ended in-house phone making in 2016, and rebuilt the company around security software.

Late 2013 brought a roughly $1 billion quarterly operating loss and 4,500 layoffs, about 40 percent of the staff.
Phone production went to TCL and an Indonesian venture, BB Merah Putih.
Acquisitions included WatchDox for file security, AtHoc for crisis alerts and Good Technology for device management.
QNX, bought in 2010, now runs in hundreds of millions of vehicles, and BlackBerry IVY was built with Amazon Web Services.
In January 2022 BlackBerry shut down the services behind its classic phones, and Chen stepped down in late 2023.

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