If you happen to be reading this from a BlackBerry, your device is officially outdated. The company announced that BlackBerry OS 7.1 or earlier, the Software BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.1 will no longer work and only devices with this Software they will no longer be able to use data, make calls and send texts.
The end comes nearly 15 years after Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at igamesnews in San Francisco, and on January 7, 2007, few would have predicted that the BlackBerry would come to that end. At the time, the BlackBerry was one of the market leaders in smartphones. smart phones and approached 10% market share, a figure that rose to 20% two years later.
But like all companies that failed to adapt to the changes brought by the iPhone, the BlackBerry never evolved. Even the Key2 model, based on Android and equipped with a touch screen (it is no longer supported either), resisted the abandonment of its small physical keyboard, which at the time was the hallmark of the terminal. .
So much so that at the time, it was one of the main reasons why Research In Motion (then the parent company) didn’t pay much attention to Apple’s iPhone.
“He was not a threat to RIM’s business,” said Larry Conlee, Lazaridi’s lieutenant, according to an excerpt from the book. Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind BlackBerry’s Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall 2015. “It wasn’t safe. It drained its battery fast and it had a really bad (numeric) keyboard,” he continued.
Obviously, this was all fixed or forgotten when the iPhone gained popularity. The versatility, design, and camera of the iPhone trumped anything BlackBerry put on the market, and within five years its market value deteriorated as people moved on to other phones with keypads. BlackBerry never responded to this threat and the rest is history.
It shouldn’t have been like this. BlackBerrys were popular for a reason. They were great at emailing and messaging before the iPhone, and you could have chosen what you did best and gave people what they wanted at the same time.
But instead, they clung to their keyboards when iPhones and Android phones passed them.
mistakes and lessons
The iPhone has overtaken the BlackBerry by forging its own path. Steve Jobs may have put the rigid structure on the BlackBerry, but the iPhone wasn’t an answer to everything RIM was doing. He had a life of his own, which is part of why his competitors ignored him until it was too late.
BlackBerry quickly came up with an answer with a bad numeric keypad in late 2008 after the iPhone was clearly already in the lead.
This is an excerpt from review from PCWorld:
“Typing with the Storm isn’t much fun either. You have to click the on-screen keyboard each time you want to type a letter (the keys light up blue each time you click), which ends up being a lot more work than using a physical keyboard (or the numeric keypad on the iPhone).
I’m also worried about how the screen will hold up after so much pressure from heavy typists.”
But the death of the BlackBerry is not the fault of a single mobile. The BlackBerry may not have been able to beat the iPhone and Android, but its big mistake was not recognizing its big competitor, a mistake that surely won’t happen again anytime soon.
As we’ve seen with the Apple Watch, AirPods, and iPad, companies are now quicker to recognize and react to Apple’s decisions, and we’ll likely see a quick turnaround from Oculus (Meta) and of Vive when Apple launches its headphones. reality or virtual reality at the end of the year.
The death of the BlackBerry is also a lesson learned for Apple. It may be the first and only $3 billion company, but its leadership in the tech world is uncertain, even with such a successful collection of products as Apple.
Siri is a perfect example: Apple was ahead until Amazon and Google did better. As Apple prepares to enter new product categories, it needs to understand both what it can add and what its competitors are doing well.
Today, it’s easy to point and laugh at BlackBerry. But Apple should be smart and learn from the mistakes made by BlackBerry. BlackBerry could still be a big name in the mobile world if it had heeded the iPhone warning.
As with the iPhone, there will be threats in Apple’s domain and you will only survive if you recognize the real ones.
Original article published in igamesnews US.
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