I don’t consider myself to be a particularly vindictive person. Everyone says I’m a really nice guy and am just the most awesome and most warm and funny person to hang around with.
But dammit Research in Motion, you have to go and interrupt my GIANTS WINNING THE NFC CHAMPIONSHIP because you think it’s a great time to tell me that after what has seemed like an eternity, you finally threw out the two clowns that ruined your company? NOW? NOW YOU WANT TO TELL ME THIS?
This couldn’t wait until first thing Monday?
Okay, so let’s talk about the two hosers that built a smartphone empire and effectively flushed it down a toilet, shall we?
Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie were once guys that had vision. In the early 1990s, Lazaridis, along with Balsillie’s help, formed one of the earliest two-way wireless data communications companies whose efforts would eventually result in the creation of the first true smartphone, the BlackBerry 6200 series in 2004 (the original BlackBerry, released in 1999, was merely a two-way alphanumeric pager.)
There was literally nothing else like the BlackBerry 6200 series when it was released. It had the ability to send and receive secure email, do web browsing, integrated personal information management with desktop calendar synchronization and it could also run apps.
All of these things we take for granted in smartphones today.
Indeed, there were other players that did pioneering work in smartphones, but they were never able to achieve the traction or the product loyalty of RIM.
Companies like Microsoft and Palm attempted to keep up with RIM and the BlackBerry during those early years of the smartphone industry with their Palm OS and Windows CE/Windows Mobile products, but their efforts failed.
RIM practically had an iron grip on the corporate customer, and their dominance of the mobile messaging industry seemed practically impenetrable.
One of the reasons why RIM was able to succeed and the others were unable to thrive is that Lazaridis and Balsillie were able to see the huge value corporations as well as government agencies would put in running their devices on a secure private communications network.
With BlackBerry Enterprise Server and Research in Motion’s global network operation center in Waterloo by which all messaging was “pushed” to and from handsets, the BlackBerry established itself as the de-facto mobile data device for corporations and government.
There was literally nothing else in the early to mid-2000’s that could possibly threaten the company’s business.
All of this changed in 2007.
In 2007, two landmark products were launched. The first being Apple’s iPhone, and the second the introduction of Google’s Open Source and Linux/Java-based Android operating system, which resulted in a first-generation handset product, the T-Mobile G1, that was launched in 2008.
Both of these products demonstrated technology that was clearly superior in capability to the BlackBerry OS 4 on RIM handsets. This should have been a warning sign for the company, but it was ignored. Arrogantly.
In July of 2008, after a phenomenal year of sales after its initial product launch, Apple launched the iPhone SDK, and their App Store, which caused massive disruption in the smartphone industry generating yet again an entirely new industry of mobile app development.
In October of 2009, Verizon wireless introduced the first Android 2.0 handset, the Motorola Droid, which began a chain reaction of Android handset growth on multiple wireless carriers.
Like the iPhone’s App Store, the Motorola Droid launched with the Android Market, which allowed for 1-click smartphone application installations via the Cloud.
RIM would not follow suit with its own application ecosystem/App Store, the BlackBerry App World, until April of 2009, nine months after Apple’s own App Store launch.
Despite Google’s inability to control the OS’s fragmentation, Android has become a wild success, and now occupies approximately 45 percent of the global smartphone market.
[Next: Ignoring the signs and portents of iPhone and Android]»
