What happened to Blackberry?

In the late 90s and early 2000s, the gadget that said more than any other that you had arrived was the Blackberry, a little device from Research in Motion that let you read your e-mail and respond to it from anywhere. And then it became old-fashioned just as quickly as it burst onto the scene. What happened to Blackberry?

You might be surprised to hear the company is still around and that you can still buy Blackberry phones. But the device that made it famous, introduced January 19, 1999, isn't retro enough to be cool again and isn't its future. And it knows it.

Blackberry's rise

Blackberry was was originally founded under the name Research in Motion way back in 1984, by engineering students Mike Lazardis and and Douglas Fregin, who studied at the Canadian universities of Waterloo and Windsor, respectively. Lazardis was born March 14, 1961.

Research in Motion was a classic case of how a seeming overnight sensation can take years to develop. The company specialized in wireless communications, and its early successes centered around card readers and cash registers.

On January 19, 1999, Research in Motion released the product that made it a household name: The Blackberry 850 pager, which got its name from its miniature QWERTY keyboard's resemblance to the fruit. It was different from other pagers in that it didn't just talk to phone networks. It could also talk to a Microsoft Exchange server. This transformed e-mail. With a Blackberry, you could read and respond to e-mail even when you weren't at your desk. President Barack Obama carried one, and there was a fight when he took office whether he'd be allowed to continue carrying one.

Some people called their Blackberry a "Crackberry," because they'd develop a tendency to compulsively check the device for new e-mail messages, like a drug.

Blackberry, Exchange, and Windows

When the Blackberry 850 came out, many IT departments still focused on minicomputers and mainframes. The one I worked at was no exception.

That changed at my then-employer when some of the higher-ups discovered Blackberry 850s. The organization wasn't too keen on throwing out its existing e-mail system. Part of the organization turned to shadow IT and stood up an Exchange server. Exchange was harder to manage than other corporate e-mail systems, and it certainly wasn't cheaper, but it had the cool gadgets. If the Palm Pilot and Outlook wasn't enough to get you to migrate to Exchange from a minicomputer or Lotus Domino and Lotus Notes or Novell Groupwise, Blackberry probably was. Research in Motion changed its name to Blackberry, trading on the name recognition.

The Blackberry 850 gave Exchange a competitive advantage, and it took Windows along with it. If you wanted a Blackberry, you had to be on Exchange, and you had to be on Windows. This hurt Novell by pushing Groupwise, its mail system, aside. It also pushed Macintoshes to the fringes of corporate IT, although Apple would have its revenge. You probably have a pretty good idea how that happened. But it took a few years.

Adding the Internet

The product line quickly moved from just being a pager that could read and respond to e-mail, and pivoted to the smartphone market. By that I mean making phone calls, Internet access, and everything. This allowed Blackberry to move downmarket. Executives liked having access to e-mail all the time. Non-managerial types often did not, because it meant work encroached into non-working hours.

But once Blackberry devices had Internet access, non-managerial types wanted one. Having e-mail all the time was a burden. Having Internet all the time was a convenience. Soon, you started seeing billboards from cell phone providers touting the benefits of their service tied with a Blackberry.

And then, almost as suddenly as it burst onto the scene, you didn't hear a lot about Blackberry devices anymore. What happened to Blackberry? Apple happened.

Apple's revenge

In 2008, Apple released its first iPhone, a smartphone with a capacitive touch screen. This meant the screen could cover almost the entirety of the device. Some people preferred physical miniature QWERTY keyboards at first, but the larger screen made Blackberry devices seem old-fashioned. Apple's operating system did a better job of encouraging third party software development. Blackberry tried to compete, even introducing a touch screen, but just couldn't match Apple's marketing.

And the iPhone worked with just about everything. This relegated the Blackberry to what we call "legacy" in IT. It survived in a niche, partly due to security, but it was no longer the must-have status symbol. Late in his second term, even President Obama had soured on his Blackberry.

What happened to Blackberry? Transformation happened

What happened to Blackberry next? In 2013, the company quietly shifted from mobile to software under CEO John Chen. And they made 8 acquisitions between 2013 and 2018. Then, in November 2018, Blackberry surprised everyone by purchasing Cylance Inc for $1.4 billion. Cylance is a company that specializes in corporate antivirus based on artificial intelligence, giving it an advantage over McAfee and Symantec. It recognizes behavior, rather than mathematical equations, which means it does a better job of recognizing viruses that modify themselves as they work.

The Cylance deal didn't work out how Blackberry hoped. Blackberry's revenue dropped between 2018 and 2024, and in December 2024, Blackberry sold most of Cylance to discount security firm Arctic Wolf for $160 million. The problem for Blackberry and Cylance is that corporations increasingly opt for Endpoint Detection and Response tools from companies like Crowdstrike, which allow you to do more than just quarantine suspicious executable files.

Blackberry has made a number of other software acquisitions over the years as well, including the embedded operating system QNX, and the voice and data encryption company Secusmart. In recent years, these have been better sources of revenue for Blackberry than Cylance, and Blackberry transformed itself from a maker of phones to a software publisher.