BlackBerry Saw the iPhone Coming. Here's Why It Still Lost.

The story

In 2009, the President of the United States fought to keep his BlackBerry. Less than five years later, BlackBerry lost nearly a billion dollars in a single quarter and cut 40% of its workforce.

BlackBerry's founders weren't blind to the iPhone. One of them watched it launch and asked, "How did they do that?" This is the story of how the phone the world couldn't put down got put down, and the surprising way the company survived.

Three lessons

1. 1

   Your best customers can blind you. Business users loved keyboards. Everyone else moved on.

2. 2

   Success can hide a crisis. When sales are still growing, it is easy to believe the danger isn't real.

3. 3

   Know your true strength. BlackBerry's real edge was trust and security, and that is what saved it.

Chapters

1. 0:00Intro
2. 0:49Two Engineers from Waterloo
3. 1:25Email in Your Pocket
4. 2:05The King of the Boardroom
5. 2:33How Did They Do That?
6. 3:20Keyboards in a Touchscreen World
7. 4:02Too Little, Too Late
8. 4:41The Quiet Comeback
9. 5:27Three Lessons
10. 6:04Outro

Sources

Every fact in this file is checked against published sources before release. See our standards.

• The Canadian Encyclopedia, BlackBerry Limited
• Fortune, What the BlackBerry guys said when they saw the iPhone (Losing the Signal excerpt)
• NBC News, Obama gets to keep his BlackBerry (2009)
• CrackBerry.com, Crackberry is the 2006 Word of the Year
• NBC News, BlackBerry subscriber base hits 80 million (2012)
• InvestorPlace, A brief history of Research In Motion
• NPR, BlackBerry to slash workforce amid $1 billion loss (2013)
• BlackBerry, Fiscal Year 2026 results (QNX in 275M+ vehicles)