BlackBerry owned the keyboard, then the phone stopped needing one

Research In Motion, a Canadian company from Waterloo, Ontario, turned a two-way pager into the business tool of the 2000s. The BlackBerry pushed corporate email to your pocket the moment it arrived, through the company’s own secure infrastructure, and you answered on a small physical keyboard that people learned to use with their thumbs at speed. IT departments trusted it, so companies bought it in bulk for their staff. The habit was strong enough to earn a nickname, “CrackBerry”.

Apple announced the iPhone in January 2007: no keyboard, a large touchscreen, a full web browser and, from 2008, an App Store. BlackBerry kept growing for a while. Its share of global smartphone sales peaked at around 20% in 2009, then fell for years as the iPhone and Android phones took over. The touchscreen BlackBerry Storm (2008) was poorly received, BlackBerry 10 arrived in 2013, and in 2016 the company stopped developing its phones in-house and turned to software and security. Services for its classic devices were switched off in January 2022.

The yardstick moved

For years the category had a clear yardstick: how well a phone handled email and messages for someone at work. On that measure BlackBerry led, and the keyboard was a proof you could feel under your thumbs. The iPhone asked to be judged on other things. It was a pocket computer that also made calls, rated on its screen, its browser, its apps and how pleasant it was to use. On that yardstick the keyboard became space that could have been screen.

This is the pattern behind the incumbents we study, which fall by a change of field far more often than by a frontal attack. When the premise of a category changes (who it is for, what it is expected to do), the old leader’s best features can turn into constraints. BlackBerry’s product kept improving at the job the market was valuing less every quarter.

The buyer changed too

The second shift was in who chose the phone. BlackBerry’s customer was often the IT department, which cared about security, battery life and control. The iPhone was chosen by individuals, and they started bringing their own phones to work and asking IT to support them. Once the decision moved from the procurement office to the person holding the device, the criteria moved with it.

Read through MOA (motivation, opportunity, ability), the new buyers had the motivation for a phone they enjoyed using, the opportunity once companies opened their networks to personal devices, and the ability, because a touchscreen with apps turned out to be easy to learn. Part of BlackBerry’s lead had rested on an opportunity controlled by corporate procurement. When that gate opened, it opened for everyone.

Why moving late is so common

Seen from the inside, defending the keyboard looked sensible for a long time. The business was large and still growing after 2007, enterprise customers were loyal, and the early touchscreens had real weaknesses. A rational organization tends to wait until the evidence is complete, and in a category shift the evidence is complete only after the curves have crossed.

Our reading is that the best moment to question a premise is while the numbers still say you are winning. The signal to watch is the yardstick itself. When customers start comparing you on criteria where you do not lead, your market share is still reporting on the old game, and it will keep doing so for a while.

If you want the people who run your product to notice when the premise of their category starts to move, train your team to read the yardstick alongside the sales figures.