At its peak, BlackBerry was a status symbol. Just like Apple today.
CEOs wore it on their belts. Wall Street ran on it. Barack Obama fought the Secret Service to keep his after entering the White House. At one point, BlackBerry controlled over 50% of the US smartphone market. Naomi Campbell once threw one at a housekeeper. That is the kind of cultural weight we are talking about.
And then, within a few years, it was gone. Into thin air like it never existed.
How Blackberry Got Started
Research in Motion (RIM) was not some overnight success story. Founders Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin started the company back in 1984, building wireless data tech when most people had never heard the term. They spent over a decade grinding through niche products before launching the BlackBerry 850 in 1999: a device that let professionals send and receive email from anywhere in the world on a small keyboard that fit in your pocket.
That was genuinely revolutionary. Before BlackBerry, staying connected meant sitting at a desk. The BlackBerry freed people from that. It also came with end-to-end encryption that made it the gold standard for government and corporate security.
BBM, BlackBerry Messenger, made it stickier. It was a closed chat network, exclusive to BlackBerry users, and it turned the phone into a social ecosystem before anyone used that phrase. The blinking red notification light became so addictive that users nicknamed the device the "Crackberry." Webster's New World College Dictionary made it their word of the year in 2006.
By 2013, there were 85 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide. The company was worth over $70 billion at its height.
The Moment Everything Cracked
In January 2007, Steve Jobs walked onto a stage and introduced the iPhone.
BlackBerry's co-CEOs, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, were not worried. They were dismissive. Their read: mobile data networks could not support web browsing at scale, the touchscreen keyboard would frustrate users, and serious professionals would never give up physical buttons. They called it a toy.
That confidence was not entirely irrational. BlackBerry had locked up every major corporate IT department. Government agencies, law firms, Fortune 500 companies all depended on their infrastructure. The assumption was that enterprise demand would hold, no matter what consumers did.
But then a new phrase entered corporate vocabulary: Bring Your Own Device.
Employees started showing up to work with iPhones anyway. IT departments had to adapt. The tight, controlled BlackBerry ecosystem that once felt like a feature started feeling like a cage. And while BlackBerry stood still, Apple launched the App Store in 2008. Developers flooded in. Games, productivity tools, social media, everything. BlackBerry's sparse app marketplace could not compete.
What’s more interesting is that BlackBerry reportedly had touchscreen prototypes before Apple went public with the iPhone. They had the talent and the money. But they stayed anchored to the physical keyboard because it was what made them BlackBerry. That identity became a trap.
The Numbers Tell the Rest
In 2013, BlackBerry posted a $1 billion loss in a single quarter and laid off 4,500 employees. That same year, Apple's iPhone division generated more revenue than all of Microsoft combined.
By 2016, BlackBerry stopped manufacturing phones entirely. It signed a deal with TCL to keep the brand alive. TCL pulled out in 2020. Facebook's decision to end WhatsApp support for BlackBerry devices that same year was the final nail. Users who had stayed loyal had no path forward.
Market share went from 50% to 0.00036%. No, that is not a typo.
Three Lessons Worth Keeping
Now, if you as a startup founder don’t want your product or business to end up like BlackBerry, here are a few takeaways for you:
Your biggest strength can become your biggest liability.
BlackBerry's physical keyboard was the reason millions of people bought the device. It was also the reason leadership refused to take touchscreens seriously until the market had already moved.
Whatever makes your product great today deserves a hard question: what happens if the world stops needing that specific thing?
Owning a customer segment is not the same as owning the future.
BlackBerry owned enterprise. That felt unshakeable. But consumers pulled enterprise with them. When employees chose iPhones for personal use, IT departments eventually followed.
If your product only works for one segment, pay close attention to who influences that segment's decisions. Always keep an eye on market trends. The future is evolving at a pace like no other. You adapt or you go downhill. There’s nothing in between.
Speed of reaction matters more than being right.
BlackBerry was not wrong to be skeptical of early touchscreen tech. The first iPhone had real limitations. The mistake was using that skepticism as a reason to slow down internal development. By the time BlackBerry released touchscreen models, the learning curve Apple had already climbed made every BlackBerry attempt look dated on arrival.
Never be too confident with your business. If BlackBerry can go from 50% market share to null, your business can too.
One thing to remember
BlackBerry did not fall because it built a bad product. It fell because it stopped asking whether the product still fit the world. The market did not ambush them. It moved in plain sight, slowly, for years. The lesson every founder should carry: the companies that get disrupted are rarely the ones that stopped working hard. They are the ones that stopped paying attention.
