I want you to take a moment and just look at
your smartphone. It's probably sitting right
there on the desk next to you. Or maybe you're
even holding it right now. It's this seamless
slab of glass. It's a portal to everything. Your
bank, your TV, your maps, your camera. It's your
entire life in your hand. It is. For all intents
and purposes, it's a magic wand. But I want to
take you back to a very specific moment not that
long ago, really. A moment where the ancestor
of that device. The machine that kind of kicked
off this whole mobile revolution. It didn't just
become obsolete. It essentially died. And when
we say died, we're not being metaphorical here
like, oh, people stopped buying it. We are talking
about a functional, definitive. Hard stop death.
Exactly. The kind where the screen just goes
dark and that little red light never blinks again.
The date was January 4th, 2022. It sounds so
recent, doesn't it? But that was the day the
servers went cold. That was the official decommissioning
date for all BlackBerry legacy services. The
end of an era. And I think for a lot of people,
you know, that news blip just came and went.
But if you really unpack what happened on that
day, it's... It's just wild. Not just no more
software updates. No, this was BlackBerry Limited,
the company, literally flipping the off switch
on the entire infrastructure that powered devices
running BlackBerry 7 .1 OS and earlier and BlackBerry
10. Right. So if you are one of those diehard
fans still clinging to a BlackBerry Classic or
a Bold, in early 2022, you woke up that morning
and your phone was, for all intents and purposes,
a paperweight. We're talking no data connection,
sure. That's a given. No SMS text messages. But
the kicker, and this is the part that gets me,
is no ability to even dial 911. That is the part
that blows my mind. A phone that cannot call
emergency services is no longer a phone. It's
not. It's just a nostalgic brick of plastic and
silicon. It's the ultimate form of obsolescence,
really. Usually, old tech just gets slow. You
know, it stops getting updates. The apps don't
work. But it doesn't lose its most fundamental
utility, the ability to maybe save your life.
This shutdown marked the true functional death
of the classic BlackBerry. And it really serves
as the final, final period at the end of a very
long, very dramatic sentence. And that right
there is our mission for this deep dive. We aren't
just here to eulogize a gadget. We're going to
unpack the entire saga of research in motion.
This is a story about a small Canadian company
that went from like soldering circuit boards
for pagers to creating a global medical condition.
I mean, we literally called it an addiction and
then just spiraling into near total irrelevance
in the hardware market. It is arguably one of
the most dramatic rise and fall stories in the
history of modern technology. I mean, you've
got brilliant engineering. You have what looks
like corporate espionage. You have international
diplomatic incidents. And you have a cultural
phenomenon. phenomenon that just fundamentally
rewired the human brain. Absolutely. But before
we get into the nuts and bolts of the hardware
and the servers, we have to talk about that rewiring.
We have to talk about the crackberry. The crackberry.
It's one of those terms that if you weren't there,
it probably sounds like some kind of, you know,
crazy hyperbole. But it wasn't. It really wasn't.
No, it was literal. I mean, get this. Webster's
New World College Dictionary formally recognized
the word Crackberry in 2006. Wow. Think about
the cultural saturation you need for a dictionary
to basically say, yes, this specific brand of
phone is now synonymous with a dependency disorder.
It really speaks to the sheer behavioral shift
it caused. You have to remember the context of
the late 90s and early 2000s. Before Blackberry,
email was. It was a destination. Right. You went
to check your email. You sat down at a desk.
You booted up a PC. You listened to that awful
modem screen. The dial -up sound. Oh, my God.
Exactly. And you waited. You were tethered to
a physical place. It was the whole you've got
mail era. It was an event. You planned it. Precisely.
And BlackBerry just severed that tether. It created
the always -on culture we now live in. Suddenly,
the inbox was in your pocket. You could be in
a taxi. at a dinner party, or in bed, which was
the source of so many arguments back then. And
you were connected. It didn't just change how
we worked. It completely changed the expectations
of availability. It just collapsed that boundary
between work time and lifetime and the numbers.
The numbers really reflect that obsession. I
was looking at the subscriber stats in our source
material, and the growth curve is practically
a vertical wall. It's incredible. At its absolute
peak, September 2011, there were 85 million BlackBerry
subscribers. subscribers worldwide. 85 million.
And you have to put that in the context of 2011.
That is a massive, massive global footprint.
But what's even more fascinating to me is the
speed of the collapse that followed. The drop
off is it's terrifying from a business perspective.
By March 2016, so less than five years later,
that number had plummeted from 85 million down
to 23 million. A huge drop. And by the fourth
quarter of 2016, just a few months later, the
global market share was effectively 0 .0 percent.
0 .0. From owning half the market to a rounding
error in five years. That is what we need to
dissect. How on earth do you lose 85 million
people that quickly? Well, to understand the
fall, you really have to understand why they
rose so high in the first place. And that story
doesn't start in Silicon Valley. It starts in
Waterloo, Ontario. The Silicon Valley of the
North, as they called it. Exactly. This is the
home of Research in Motion. RIM, founded by Mike
Lizaritis. And Lizaritis is such a key character
in all of this because he wasn't one of those
move fast and break things software guys. No.
He was an engineer's engineer. He was completely
obsessed with radio frequencies. battery efficiency,
the physics of data transmission. They didn't
start with phones, did they? They started with
pagers. That's right. And again, for some of
our younger listeners, a pager was usually just
a little black box that beeped and showed you
a phone number, and then you had to go find a
payphone to call the person back. A one -way
street. But RIM wasn't making those dumb pagers,
were they? No. RIM was already pushing the envelope
with two -way paging. They launched the Inter
at Active Pager 900 way back in 1996. It was
a clamshell device, so it flipped open, and it
had this tiny little keyboard. You could actually
type a reply. That's the breakthrough right there,
closing the loop. Right. Then came the 950 in
1998, which was about the size of a bar of soap.
But the real inflection point, the device that
we can point to and say, that's the one, that's
the start, was the BlackBerry 850. It was released
on January 19th, 1999. Let's just pause on the
branding for a second. Because BlackBerry is
such a perfect name. It's organic. It's friendly.
It's memorable. It stands out so much against
these like technical names like Interactive Pager
or Palm Pilot. Where did that come from? It was
no accident. They actually hired a professional
firm called Lexicon Branding. These are the pros
who name things like the Pentium chip. Oh, wow.
And the story goes that the branding experts
were examining the device, specifically looking
at that little keyboard. The tiny clicky buttons.
Right. And someone in the room remarked that
the keys look like the droplets of a fruit. Droplets.
Is that a real word? It's the botanical term,
apparently, for the little individual bumps that
make up a berry, like on a raspberry or a blackberry.
Huh. I learned something today. So they started
brainstorming fruit names. They apparently considered
strawberry, melon, even some vegetables. Just
shoot me a message on my melon. It doesn't quite
have the same ring to it. It really doesn't.
And they felt strawberries sounded too slow,
like you stroll through a strawberry field. I
don't know the logic. But blackberry just felt
snappy. The device was black. The keys looked
like the fruit. It just clicked and it beat out
something like 40 other names to become the winner.
And it was brilliant because it totally softened
the technology. It made this high tech business
communication tool feel approachable. But here's
the thing. The 850 was still at its heart a pager.
It did email, but it wasn't a phone. When did
voice actually enter the picture? This is where
the evolution gets a little clunky. The first
device that was technically a phone was the BlackBerry
5810, which came out in 2002. But it had this
one fatal flaw that is just hilarious in hindsight.
Oh, I know this one. It's the headset requirement,
isn't it? It is baffling to think about now.
The device had no internal microphone and no
ear speaker. So if you wanted to make or receive
a phone call, you had to physically plug in a
wired headset. Just imagine the scene. You're
this high -powered executive in 2002, your fancy
new BlackBerry rings, and you're frantically
untangling a wire from your pocket just to answer,
hello? It's absurd. It effectively meant you
couldn't use it as a spontaneous phone. It was
a data device that could do voice if you were
prepared for it. But here's the crucial insight.
It didn't matter. Why not? That seems like a
huge deal. Because voice wasn't the killer app.
The killer app was push email. Okay, we need
to go deep on this because today push notifications
are just standard. Everything is pushed to our
phones. But back then, this was absolutely revolutionary.
Explain the difference between polling and push
in a way that shows why RIM was so far ahead
of everyone. Sure. So in the pre -BlackBerry
era, if you had a mobile device like a Palm Pilot
with a modem attachment or something, you used
a system called polling. Think of polling like
you walking out to your physical mailbox at the
end of the driveway. You walk out, you open the
box, you check inside, it's empty, you walk back
to the house. Ten minutes later, you're curious,
so you walk out again, check again. Still empty.
It's active. You are doing all the work. Your
device is doing the work. Exactly. And in computing
terms, that work costs battery life and data.
Every time it polls, your device has to wake
up its radio, establish a connection with the
server, handshake, ask, is there any mail for
me? Mm -hmm. get a no, and then shut the radio
down again. Doing that constantly just drains
the battery incredibly fast. So what did BlackBerry
do that was so different? They completely reversed
the flow. They introduced the NOC, the Network
Operations Center. This was their centralized
fortress of servers in Waterloo. Right. So when
an email hit your corporate exchange server at
your office, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server,
or BES, would... grab it, compress it, encrypt
it, and fire it instantly to the NOC. So the
NOC is like the central traffic cop for all BlackBerry
data. Exactly. And the NOC maintains a constant
but very, very low -energy heartbeat connection
with your device out in the field. It's just
this tiny trickle of data. The moment the NOC
gets that email, it pushes it down that always
-on pipe to your device. To use your analogy,
instead of me walking to the mailbox every 10
minutes, the mailman literally walks into my
house and hands me the letter the second it arrives.
That's a perfect way to put it. And because of
the incredible compression they used, I mean,
they were stripping out all the heavy HTML code,
the big headers just sitting in the raw text.
It was ridiculously efficient. A BlackBerry could
last three or four days on a single charge because
its radio wasn't constantly screaming for a connection.
It was just listening quietly. That battery life
was a huge part of the addiction. didn't have
to think about it. But the other part of the
addiction was the input method, the keyboard.
A glorious, cruddy keyboard. It really popularized
thumb typing. Before this, people were either
using a stylus on a Palm Pilot. trying to write
in that weird graffiti shorthand, or they were
using T9 on a number pad, hitting the number
seven four times just to get the letter S. It
was painful. BlackBerry just said, no, we are
giving you a miniature typewriter for your thumbs.
And the tactile feedback of that click was so
essential. The click was a confirmation. You
didn't even have to look at the screen. people
became masters at typing under the conference
room table. The blind type. That was the ultimate
power move, wasn't it? Maintaining perfect eye
contact with your boss while you're secretly
emailing your spouse about what to pick up for
dinner. It was. And we can't forget the navigation,
which was just as genius. The side -mounted scroll
wheel. Oh, the wheel. That click, click, click
was so satisfying. It was a fidget toy before
fidget toys were a thing. You could just scroll
through endless emails with just your thumb.
Later, they moved to the Pearl trackball. which
was amazing until it got full of pocket lint.
And then the optical trackpad, which finally
solved the lint problem. But that perfect combination,
the push email for speed, the keyboard for input,
and the wheel for navigation, it created this
loop of efficiency that was just intoxicating.
But there was one more layer to this ecosystem,
a kind of digital velvet rope that kept you locked
in and made you feel part of an exclusive club.
BBM. BlackBerry Messenger. This is really where
the story shifts from just being a business tool
to becoming a social lifeline. I mean before
WhatsApp, before iMessage, before Instagram DMs,
there was BBM. BBM was the original mobile instant
messenger. And it was exclusive. It didn't use
your phone number. It relied on the PIN. PIN.
That eight character code. Mine was something
like 20F3A99. It looked like a license plate
or a secret code. It was hexadecimal. Yeah. And
unlike a phone number, which you can port to
a new carrier or a username that you can change,
the PIN was hard -coded to the silicon of that
specific device. So your identity was physically,
inextricably tied to the hardware in your hand.
Yes. And to message someone... You had to exchange
pins. It became this whole ritual. What's your
pin was the ultimate pickup line in a bar in
2005. It was a completely closed loop. If you
didn't have a Blackberry, you weren't invited
to the party. And it introduced features that
completely changed social anxiety forever. I'm
talking about the D and the R. Delivered and
read. The original blue ticks from iMessage.
The R, the absolute trauma of the R. Seeing that
someone had read your message and was actively
choosing not to reply, BlackBerry literally engineered
that specific brand of modern anxiety. They did.
But there was also a very practical economic
reason for BBM's dominance, especially in markets
outside of North America. It was the cost, right?
It was a huge factor. You have to remember, in
the mid -2000s, SMS text messages cost money.
You paid 10 cents, 20 cents per message, or maybe
you had a monthly plan with a bucket of 100 texts.
I vividly remember going over my text limit as
a teenager and my dad absolutely losing his mind
at the bill. We all do. BVM, on the other hand,
used data. And because the data packets were
so tiny and compressed, it was virtually free
if you had even the most basic data plan. You
could send 10 ,000 BBMs for the cost of zero
SMS messages. In markets like Indonesia, South
Africa, and the UK, this made BlackBerry the
default phone for teenagers. It wasn't a business
tool there. It was a chat machine. We should
circle back to Indonesia later because that's
a whole fascinating subplot in itself. But I
want to pivot from the teenagers to the complete
other end of the spectrum, the spies and the
presidents, because the other massive selling
point of the whole PI system was security. This
is where BlackBerry just completely dominated
the enterprise world. They had the BlackBerry
Enterprise Server, the BES. This allowed a company's
IT department to have total granular control
over their fleet of devices. They could remotely
wipe a phone if an employee lost it. They could
enforce password policies. It was the CIO's dream.
And the encryption. End -to -end encryption between
the device and the corporate server. Initially,
it was triple DES. Later, it was upgraded to
AES. For years, it was considered the Fort Knox.
of mobile communications. It was so secure that
the U .S. government was their single biggest
customer. And of course, we have to talk about
the most famous user of all time, Barack Obama.
The first BlackBerry president. When he won the
election in 2008, there was this legitimate battle
between him and the Secret Service. There was.
The standard protocol was no outside devices.
The president of the United States does not carry
a personal cell phone. It's a security risk.
It's a tracker. But Obama was an addict. He fought
for it. He said he needed it to stay connected
to the real world, to escape the White House
bubble. So they had to come to a compromise.
They did. The NSA actually had to custom build
him a device. They took a BlackBerry 8830 World
Edition and they strip mined it. They removed
the camera, the microphone, the GPS, basically
everything fun. And then they loaded it with
their own custom hardened encryption software.
It could only communicate with a tiny handful
of whitelisted people. like his chief of staff
and his family. But he got to keep it. And marketing
experts at the time estimated that that single
image, the president of the United States looking
down at his BlackBerry, was worth somewhere between
$25 and $50 million in free advertising. It completely
solidified the brand's identity as the serious
choice. The message was... If it's secure enough
for the nuclear codes, it's secure enough for
your quarterly earnings spreadsheet. And it wasn't
just him. Hillary Clinton famously used one as
Secretary of State, which, well, we all know
that led to some email server controversies down
the line. But it proves the point about its prevalence
in government. And the source material also mentions
police forces. Yeah, the West Yorkshire police
in the UK, police forces in India. The logic
was all about efficiency. If an officer can run
a license plate or file a report right from the
street on their Blackberry, they don't have to
drive all the way back to the station to use
a desktop. It kept cops on the beat longer. So
if we paint the picture, we have this image of
absolute total dominance. The corporate world
is locked in through the BES. The government
is locked in through security. The teenagers
are locked in through the free messaging on BBM.
It just feels... Unbreakable. It certainly must
have felt that way to them in say 2009. But they
got greedy. Or maybe ambitious is the kinder
word. They weren't content with just the suits
and the spies. They wanted the regular consumer
too. The big consumer pivot. This is where we
see the launch of the BlackBerry Pearl back in
2006. The Pearl was a totally different device.
It was skinny. It came in different colors. It
had a camera. It had a media player. It was explicitly
designed to look good in a purse or a pocket,
not just hang off a belt clip and a leather holster.
Yeah. And you know what? It worked. This is when
the celebrity culture around BlackBerry just
exploded. The list of users is a complete who's
who of the 2000s. You have Kim Kardashian. A
self -confessed addict. She was famous for saying
she stockpiled old BlackBerry Bold models that
she bought on eBay just to have backups because
she was terrified they would stop making them.
She needed that physical keyboard for her typing
speed. Jay -Z, Beyonce. And here's a stat from
the source that just blew my mind. Eminem. Marshall
Mathers, yeah. The source material says that
as of 2024, he reportedly still uses a BlackBerry
OS phone. Talk about brand loyalty. But you can
kind of see why, right? He's a famously private
person. He probably wants a tool that just does
communication, not a distraction machine with
a million apps. So hit us with the peak numbers.
When was RIM officially on top of the world?
The year was 2009. At that point, RIM held 56
% of the entire U .S. smartphone market. Fortune
magazine ranked them the number one fastest growing
company in the world. They were just printing
money. 56%. That is basically a monopoly. And
yet, and this is... the real tragedy of the story.
By 2009, the seeds of their destruction had already
been planted and had been growing for two full
years. January 9, 2007, the Mac World Expo in
San Francisco. Steve Jobs. He walks out on stage
and introduces the iPhone. And the mythology
around this event is often that the executives
at BlackBerry just ignored it, that they laughed
at it. Is that true? Did they laugh at it? Not
exactly. They did see it, but they just fundamentally
misunderstood what it was. And to be fair to
them, from their very specific engineering -focused
perspective, the original iPhone was a disaster.
It kind of was. It ran on the slow 2G network,
not 3G. It had no copy -paste, no MMS messaging.
The battery life was atrocious compared to a
BlackBerry. And the keyboard, I mean, trying
to type on glass felt like tapping on a table.
It was awful. Right. Mike Lazaridis, the founder,
looked at the iPhone. He said, basically, this
is a toy. It consumes a massive amount of data,
the battery won't last a day, and you can't type
on it. No serious lawyer or banker will ever
give up their physical keyboard for a sheet of
glass. He viewed the phone as a productivity
tool, an email and messaging machine. Exactly.
RIM was optimizing for production, for writing
words, for sending messages. Apple was optimizing
for consumption, for browsing the real web, looking
at photos, watching videos. And RIM completely
missed the fact that even serious business people
like to have fun sometimes. Precisely. There's
a story in one of the books about Blackberry
that when RIMS engineers first got an iPhone
and tore it down, they thought it was fake. They
looked at the size of the screen and the speed
of the processor and said, this is impossible.
The battery logic doesn't work. It must be some
kind of trick. They were so entrenched in their
own engineering constraints, you know, bandwidth
conservation, battery efficiency, that they couldn't
imagine a world where people would just accept
charging their phone every single night. And
that mindset, that sort of engineering hubris
that we know better than the user, is what started
the slide. By 2010, the iPhone 3GS had overtaken
the BlackBerry curve as the best -selling device
in the U .S. Android was rising fast, and BlackBerry
started to panic. And from that panic came the
BlackBerry storm. Oh, the storm. 2008. This is
their big, rushed answer to the iPhone. And it
was. It was so weird. It was. It was a touchscreen.
But because they were so obsessed with the idea
of tactile feedback, the click of a keyboard,
they made the entire screen one big mechanical
button. The whole glass panel physically moved
down and clicked when you pressed it. Sure press,
they called it. It was a complete disaster. The
mechanics failed all the time. The software was
rushed and incredibly buggy. It was slow. It
was the first time that loyal BlackBerry users
picked up a new device from the company and said,
wait, this is garbage. It really damaged the
brand's reputation for quality. But even if the
hardware had been perfect, they had a much, much
bigger problem looming. The app gap. This was
the true killer. The real Trojan horse. Apple
had the App Store. Google had what was then the
Android market. Developers were flocking to these
new platforms because the tools were great and
there was a hungry audience of millions. And
Blackberry. Blackberry OS was built on an old,
clunky, Java -based platform. It was designed
for security and efficiency, not for playing
Angry Birds or scrolling through Instagram or
hailing an Uber. So while your friends with iPhones
are hailing a cab with an app, you're stuck trying
to look up a local taxi number on a slow, clunky
web browser on your Blackberry. That's exactly
the problem. They tried to fix it. They released
the Playbook tablet in 2011, which was actually
a pretty nice piece of hardware. And they built
an Android player into it, which was supposed
to let you run Android apps on a BlackBerry device.
But emulation is never as good as the real thing,
is it? Never. It was buggy. It was slow. It was
a complicated process for developers. It was
like putting a small Band -Aid on a massive gaping
wound. And then, as if the fierce competition
wasn't enough, the one thing BlackBerry had left,
their rock -solid reputation for reliability,
it just imploded. The great crash of 2011. We
talked about the NOC earlier, that centralized
fortress that made everything so efficient. Well,
the major downside of a centralized fortress
is that it's a single point of failure. If the
NOC goes down, everyone goes down. And in October
of 2011, it went down hard. A core switch failed
at their data center in Slough in England. And
for reasons that are still kind of murky, the
backup system failed to kick in properly. The
backlog of messages started to cascade and spiral
out of control. For days, I mean literally for
days, millions of users across Europe, the Middle
East, Africa, and eventually North America had
nothing. No email, no BBM. Just imagine the business
chaos, deals being missed. Critical communications
just cut off. It was a nightmare. It cost the
company an estimated $50 million in service credits
they had to give to carriers. But the reputational
damage was incalculable. It broke the trust.
People all over the world suddenly realized,
wait a minute. If this one server room and again
breaks, my phone is completely useless. Why am
I paying a premium for this? So the walls are
just closing in from all sides. But before we
get to the final financial collapse, we need
to talk about a massive legal battle that almost
killed the company way. Way, way before the iPhone
was even a glimmer in Steve Jobs' eye. Because
this is a part of the story people often forget.
The NTP lawsuit. This is a legal thriller that
honestly deserves its own movie. So who or what
was NTP? NTP Inc. was a patent holding company
based in Virginia. Now, critics would call them
a patent troll. They didn't make any products.
They didn't have a factory or employees in that
sense. They just held patents. And one of those
patents, they claimed, covered the fundamental
concept of wireless email. The concept. That
seems incredibly broad. It was. They sued RIM
way back in 2000. And RIM, being this group of
proud Canadian engineers, largely just dismissed
it. They thought, this is absurd. We invented
this technology from scratch. These guys are
nobodies. The court will obviously see that.
A classic case of engineering hubris in the courtroom.
A fatal case of hubris. The jury didn't understand
all the technical nuance. They looked at the
broad language of the patent. They looked at
what BlackBerry did and they said, yep, that
looks the same to us. They found RIM guilty of
infringement, but not just infringement, willful
infringement. Willful. That is a very scary word
in patent law. It is because it means the judge
has the discretion to triple the damages. But
the money wasn't even the real threat. The real
threat was the injunction. Explain what that
means. A judge, a man named James Spencer. was
reportedly just fed up with RIM's arrogant attitude
throughout the trial. He was on the verge of
signing a court order that would have legally
forced RIM to shut down the entire BlackBerry
network in the United States. Just turn it off.
Turn it off. Every BlackBerry in Washington,
D .C., every lawyer in New York, every doctor
on call dead. Instantly. That sounds like a legitimate
national security crisis waiting to happen. It
was. The situation got so dire. that the U .S.
Department of Justice and the Department of Defense
actually had to intervene. They filed official
briefs with the court saying effectively, Your
Honor, please do not turn this service off. The
United States government cannot function without
BlackBerry. That is just wild. The government
basically had to admit they were too addicted
to the product to allow the normal legal process
to take its course. That intense pressure is
what finally forced RIM to settle. In 2006, they
wrote a check to NTP for $612 .5 million. Over
half a billion dollars. It was a painful, painful
check to write, but it kept the lights on. And
it bought them the time they needed to enjoy
that 2009 peak we talked about earlier. But the
government's relationship with BlackBerry wasn't
always so supportive, was it? We talked about
security before, about how unbreakable the encryption
was. But there's a darker chapter here when it
comes to privacy. The Great Privacy Paradox.
BlackBerry's biggest selling point was that it
was unhackable. But the problem is, if you are
truly unhackable, authoritarian governments really,
really hate you. I'm seeing notes here about
the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and India all threatening
to ban the service. Right. Around 2010... These
countries and others issued ultimatums. They
said terrorists and criminals are using BBM to
communicate because we can't monitor it. You
need to give our law enforcement agencies the
encryption keys or we are banning BlackBerry
service in our country. So open a back door for
us or get out. That's exactly what it was. And
RIM was in a terrible bind. If they said no,
they lose access to these massive, fast -growing
markets. If they said yes, they completely destroy
their global reputation for security. So what
did they do? For the most part, they blinked.
In most of those cases, they established servers
within those countries that would allow for what's
called lawful interception. They gave the governments
a way in. So the unbreakable shield definitely
had some cracks in it. And those cracks got a
whole lot wider in 2013 with the Edward Snowden
leaks. Oh, boy. The NSA files. The documents
that came out were pretty damning. They revealed
that the NSA and their British counterpart, GCHQ,
had been successfully compromising BlackBerry
data for years. What specifically could they
do? The leaked documents suggested the NSA could
read SMS traffic on BlackBerry devices and had
found ways to decrypt some BlackBerry emails.
But the British GCHQ had a program with the most
incredible name. Scrap Heap Challenge. Scrap
Heap Challenge? That sounds like a monster truck
rally. It was a spoofing tool. It allowed British
intelligence agents to send emails that looked
like they came from a target's BlackBerry device.
So they could impersonate you in an email. Yes.
And perhaps the most technical but also most
concerning revelation was about a specific encryption
algorithm called Dual ECDRBG. That's a mouthful.
It's a random number generator that's used to
create encryption keys. The U .S. National Institute
of Standards and Technology, or NIST, eventually
had to warn people not to use it because it very
likely contained a mathematical backdoor that
had been put there by the NSA. And BlackBerry
was using it. BlackBerry Software supported this
flawed algorithm long after these security concerns
had been raised, and they didn't seem to issue
any advisory to their customers about it. So
while they were selling military -grade security
to you and me, The big intelligence agencies
potentially had a skeleton key the whole time.
It certainly complicates the whole security legacy.
They were secure against maybe a corporate rival
or a hacker, but not against the state. That
seems to be the case. Okay, let's fast forward
to the endgame. We're talking about the years
2013 to 2016. This is the era of the Hail Mary
passes. It's the tragic final phase, really.
The company knows it's bleeding users and money.
They finally replaced the co -CEOs, Michael Azuritis
and Jim Bolsillier out. A new guy, Thorsten Heinz,
comes in, and then later John Chen. And they
bet the entire company on one last roll of the
dice, BlackBerry 10. I remember BlackBerry 10.
The Z10, which was all touchscreen, and the Q10,
which had the keyboard. And you know what? The
OS itself was actually pretty good. It had this
feature called the hub that aggregated all...
Your messages, email, Twitter, Facebook, everything
into one single beautiful stream. It had a flow
interface that was all based on gestures. I remember
trying a Z10 in a store. It felt modern. It felt
fluid. But it also felt empty. It was a ghost
town. The app problem was never solved. Instagram
wasn't there. Snapchat wasn't there. All the
big games weren't there. And by 2013, if you
didn't have the apps, you didn't have a viable
smartphone, you just had a really nice pager
with a web browser. The classic case of too little,
too late. Exactly. The sales were abysmal. They
produced millions of Z10s that just sat in warehouses.
They had to take a massive inventory write -down
of nearly a billion dollars on unsold phones.
It was over. So in a final act of desperation,
they did the unthinkable. They surrendered to
the enemy. They adopted Android. The BlackBerry
Priv. 2015. The name Priv was supposed to stand
for privacy and privilege. It was a slider phone.
It looked like a normal Android slab, but the
whole screen could slide up to reveal a classic
physical BlackBerry keyboard underneath. A Frankenstein's
monster of a device. It was actually kind of
cool. I know people who loved it. But it was
very expensive. And by that point, the brand
was just cold. The magic was gone. People had
moved on to Samsung and Apple. And that leads
us to what I call the zombie brand era, September
2016. That's the date BlackBerry officially announced
they would no longer design or manufacture their
own hardware. They were completely out of the
phone business. Oh, wait a minute. I definitely
saw new BlackBerry phones for sale after 2016.
You did. But they weren't made by BlackBerry
in Waterloo. They were just licensing the name.
A big Chinese electronics company called TCL
picked up the global license. They're the ones
who made the BlackBerry Key 1 and Key 2. So it
was just outsourced nostalgia. Pretty much. And
they were actually pretty solid phones. They
ran Android. They had good keyboards and amazing
battery life. For the few remaining diehards,
they were a lifeline. But even TCL eventually
gave up the license in 2020. Then a small American
startup called Onward Mobility promised a new
5G BlackBerry. The vaporware era. They promised
it for years. And then in early 2022, they quietly
announced they were shutting down without ever
shipping a single unit. That was the final, final
nail in the hardware coffin. But, and this is
a huge and important distinction we need to make,
the company BlackBerry Limited is not dead. No,
not at all. They're very much alive and in some
ways quite successful. They just pivoted completely.
They went back to their original roots. Security,
software, and enterprise data. So if you drive
a modern car, there's a pretty good chance you're
interacting with BlackBerry software right now.
Very likely. Their software division called QNX
is the underlying operating system for the infotainment
and safety systems in millions and millions of
cars. Ford, Jaguar Land Rover, BMW, Mercedes,
they all use it. It's real -time, it's incredibly
secure, and it's crash -proof, which is what
you want in a car. So they went from being the
phone in your pocket to being the hidden brain
in your car's dashboard. And they became a major
cybersecurity consulting firm. And let's be honest,
a bit of a patent troll themselves. Right. I
remember they sued Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
They did. They basically argued, hey, that timeline
interface you have, that messaging architecture
with read receipts, we invented a lot of that.
And they settled with Facebook for an undisclosed
but likely very large sum of money. It was their
way of collecting rent on the revolution they
started but couldn't finish. So to bring it all
back home, we started this deep dive with the
server decommissioning on January 4, 2022, the
literal death of the hardware. But the legacy
is just, it's everywhere. It is. You absolutely
cannot tell the story of the 21st century without
talking about BlackBerry. So what do you think
is the lasting DNA? What did they leave behind?
I think it's two main things. First, the always
-on expectation. The idea that your boss can
email you at 8 p .m. and expect a reply. BlackBerry
normalized that, the feeling of a phantom vibration
in your pocket even when your phone isn't there.
BlackBerry started that. And the second thing.
Messaging. BBM proved that people craved instant,
data -based, receipt -verified conversations
on their phones. WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal,
iMessage. They are all, at their core, just spiritual
successors. to blackberry messenger it's such
a bittersweet legacy isn't it they built the
world we all live in now but they didn't get
to live in it themselves they built the train
tracks but the iphone and android were the slick
fast trains that everyone actually wanted to
ride on i want to leave our listeners with a
final provocative thought blackberry died because
they perfected a very specific paradigm the physical
keyboard on a communication device and they refused
to let go of it when the world shifted to a sheet
of glass It's the classic innovator's dilemma.
They were just too good at the old thing to be
the ones to invent the new thing. So look at
your phone today. That perfect slab of glass.
It feels permanent, doesn't it? It feels like
this is the final, ultimate form of the phone.
But is it? History would suggest probably not.
Is there a tech giant today that is holding on
too tightly to their own... physical keyboard?
Are we just one big breakthrough away? Maybe
it's AI pins, maybe it's augmented reality glasses,
maybe it's neural interfaces. From looking at
the iPhone the same way we now look at a BlackBerry
5810 with its clumsy headset. You mean you had
to actually hold it in your hand and touch it
with your fingers? How primitive. Exactly. The
cycle continues. History doesn't repeat itself.
but it sure does rhyme. It does indeed. Next
time you're watching those three little dots
appear when someone is typing a message to you,
just take a second and remember, you have a small
Canadian pager company to thank for that specific
brand of digital anticipation. Thanks for listening
to The Deep Dive. See you next time.