BlackBerry's Greatest Strength Was Its Fatal Flaw.

#BlackBerry #BusinessHistory #RiseAndFall #TechHistory This is the rise and fall of BlackBerry, and it is not the story you have heard. The usual version is that two executives laughed at the iPhone and got what they deserved. That version is comforting and it is wrong. This is why BlackBerry really failed: it had built the most efficient network on earth, and one afternoon in 2007 efficiency stopped being worth anything. BlackBerry was never really a phone company. It was a network company that happened to make phones. Every message ran through Research In Motion's own operations centre in Waterloo, Ontario, where it was compressed and pushed to the device, so a BlackBerry barely touched the carriers' fragile networks. That was the moat, and it is why carriers pushed the device, why it kept working on 9/11 when everything else failed, and why by January 2010 comScore had RIM at 43 percent of the entire US smartphone market, number one in America. Then in June 2007 AT&T sold the iPhone with unlimited data, and the one rule BlackBerry had obeyed for a decade was simply repealed. The same private network that made the company then killed it three ways: it convinced Mike Lazaridis the iPhone was irresponsible, it became worthless the moment a carrier chose to eat the data, and in October 2011 a single failed switch in Slough took BlackBerry down across the planet for three days. The moat and the cage were the same wall. In this episode: Mike Lazaridis, Jim Balsillie and the co-CEO company built in a Waterloo strip mall Why the real moat was the private network, not the keyboard 9/11, Karl Rove's BlackBerry, and the grip on Washington CrackBerry, the NTP settlement, and 43 percent of the US market Why AT&T's unlimited data plan quietly ended BlackBerry's whole advantage The Storm, the touchscreen that clicked, and the Verizon verdict Government bans and the 2011 global outage that broke the one promise The Z10, the Fairfax deal, and the network switched off for good Chapters: 0:00 It's going to collapse the network 1:14 A strip mall in Waterloo 2:50 The network nobody could see 4:39 Forty three percent of America 6:26 The day the rule was repealed 8:17 The Storm and the compromise 10:03 One switch in Slough 11:57 The long goodbye 13:55 The moat and the cage 15:39 What it really means Subscribe to Toppled Empires for more stories of companies, brands and empires that had everything and lost it. What was the last BlackBerry you owned, and what finally made you put it down? Tell me in the comments.