After passing “the baton to new leadership” three and a half years ago, ex-Research In Motion chief executive Jim Balsillie has publicly admitted in a new interview what everyone already knows: the iPhone was devastating to the company’s BlackBerry smartphone business. The Associated Press reports Balsillie’s comments came during a Q&A session with the authors of the recently released “Losing the Signal. The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry” book (Amazon/iBooks):
Balsillie said in his first public remarks since leaving the company in 2012 that he knew BlackBerry couldn’t compete after the iPhone’s introduction in 2007 and after BlackBerry’s buggy touchscreen device called the Storm had a “100 percent return rate.”
Balsillie also described RIM’s disastrous launch of the BlackBerry Storm as a rushed response to bring a touchscreen smartphone to market following Apple’s iPhone.
“With Storm we tried to do too much. It was a touch display, it was a clickable display, it had new applications, and it was all done in an incredibly short period of time and it blew up on us,” Balsillie said. “That was the time I knew we couldn’t compete on high end hardware.”
In his comments, Balsillie said at the time he believed that RIM have brought its once-popular BlackBerry Messenger service to iOS and Android as the company’s revenue was largely from its services and not hardware.
RIM rebranded the company as BlackBerry and did bring its BBM messaging app to both iOS and Android nearly two years after Balsillie’s departure. The service, however, still hasn’t been a massive splash with tough competition from Apple’s iMessage, Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp, and Google’s Hangouts service, and BlackBerry remains as a smartphone and services niche and not the market leader it once was.
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BS: RIM killed the BlackBerry! Their refusal to see the benefits of a GUI; People wanting more than just secure e-mail and BB Messaging; refusing to think that anyone could possibly have a secure mail /messaging client and their stubborn insistence on not seeing the “average consumer” who wanted bigger & better screens / screen resolutions. I put them in the same category as Kodak – who refused to see the value in Digital Cameras and the people demanding quality enhancements that came with people starting to experience low-res camera phones 8 years ago.
BlackBerry / RIM went the way of the Dinosaurs – they refused to adapt to the changing climate.
That said – I still miss my BlackBerry Bold keyboard!
Umm, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Kodak was an early pioneer in digital, it was not through closed eyes and ears that they disintegrated. On BB you’re also totally off base many generations of hardware had a GUI prior to 2007. RIM could not have done anything at any time to save themselves. Regardless of their outlook on features or market, they were dead the moment Apple decided they were going to make a phone.
Uh, no, no I’m sorry, you have it wrong.
If your statements were true, Android would never have become so popular either. Your reasoning only stems from “Apple, because it’s Apple”.
BlackBerry’s fall (Blackberries, plural? lol) came straight from a decisive decision from both CEO’s to collectively put their heads in the sand and pretend iPhone doesn’t exist. The Bold was only one in a many, many poor, almost comical decisions from BlackBerry. Do you not remember the interviews, the on-the-record comments and the complete apathy both Jim and Mike displayed? They made near ZERO effort to the real competition forming. These are all facts. And here is another one: They (Jim and Mike) had a literal stranglehold on the cell market for “smartphones”. Only Nokia beat them in sheer handset volume with their low cost Symbian OS.
They actually could have competed and been a true threat to iPhone. iPhone was NOT a BYOD or Business best friend at launch. It took 2 revisions before it became a true business competitor. Any business that need secure communication for email, messaging and information exchange ALL used BlackBerry. How do I know? Been a Systems Engineer in IT for a long time and witnessed first hand their rise and fall. They could have still been a massive player if those two nitwit CEO’s actually new how to respond properly.
No, BlackBerry withered away directly due to never addressing the real threat. I even doubt Jim’s comments now, which seem to lessen his responsibility and blaming everything “because of iPhone”. And that just isn’t true. This is easily shown with how Android’s rise to power happened during the golden age of iOS and iPhone. Apple may still have won the consumer due to “Apple, because it’s Apple”, but make no mistake, businesses do NOT care about the latest craze when it comes to protecting critical email and communications.
In the end, I’m still happy with my iEverything. But it could have gone much differently had BlackBerry acted responsibly.
He’s actually correct on Kodak. Kodak was a pioneer on digital, unfortunately they didn’t pursue product development beyond some low end digital cameras. Their film and printing division, the money maker at the time, made sure development was suppressed just enough.
Oh, your Dinosaur analogy is however bang-on. The Dinosaurs had no choice but to die – the catastrophe that hit the planet was completely out of their control. This is RIM in a nutshell.
I realize it was hyperbole but the return rate on the Storm was more like 99% because i had a co-worker who had one and didn’t return it. Heck, I was stuck with a Storm 2 for a while (long story but it wasn’t really by choice) until I couldn’t take it any longer and paid a steep price to escape. BB met a need at the time but never really evolved or had a vision beyond the initial one.
Make that 98%. I know two coworkers who carried that brick around for years.
He was definitely exaggerating. I think Verizon said their return rate was around 10% but up to 50% has been said as well. Still, iPhone is in the single digits.
Blackberry email sucked! Anything over 1 MB = “Your message was truncated due to size” – How can business be on the road with that kind of SOL excuse. That alone killed BB
RIM co-CEO doesn’t see threat from Apple’s iPhone – “It’s kind of one more entrant into an already very busy space with lots of choice for consumers,” Jim Balsillie said of Apple. “But in terms of a sort of a sea-change for BlackBerry, I would think that’s overstating it.” Feb 12, 2007. http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/02/12/us-rim-iphone-idUSN1236561320070212
Moron.
With the Storm, I have to agree – I got one because it looked like it would do everything I needed (planner, email, notes, apps) but it was an absolute flop. The screen-click thing started going buggy only a month after I got it, and completely died at 4 months. It took a further 2 months for me to be able to get my mobile provider to swap it out for another phone that wouldn’t break on me.
For all you apologists and the incompetent CEO of RIM…….RIM’s own complacency killed RIM. To believe otherwise is like saying the US postal service has kept pace with the evolution of mail delivery. Every organization’s management teams primary responsibility is to perpetuate the existence of the organization. Its not like they were fisherman and the expectation was to complete with Apple. They were in the same industry for Christ sake with a substantial head start.