Defiant loyalty to the end: A black day for Blackberry lovers

Defiant loyalty to the end
A black day for Blackberry lovers

By Alexander Langer

Blackberry fans have seen the decline for years. For a few days, “important functions” such as calls, SMS and even emergency calls are no longer supported. An obituary about the demise of a popular gadget – and a lost work civilization.

This news won’t sadden too many people anymore, but the beginning of the week was a black day for the few who still used their old BlackBerry: According to the end-of-life page of BlackBerry, since January 4, 2022, no more ensure that “important functions” are supported.

These include: Calls, SMS, even the emergency call. Well It goes without saying that other services such as Whatsapp, Instagram or anything else that was invented since 2013 have not been running for years. Unfortunately, very few even remember BlackBerry as a hardware manufacturer.

For us, who have defiantly remained loyal to the legendary device, it is just the final blow. So death did not come as a surprise. We have had to accompany the decline for years. Seriously: We have had bad years.

Everything followed a major contingency plan

We noticed that the BlackBerry Messenger was switched off in 2019, a kind of iMessage for BB users. In the beginning, the messenger always exuded the feeling of being privy to digital chatter among McKinsey and Goldman Sachs power pros. Then later – Wall Street also used the iPhone at some point – it was more depressing in Messenger than on zombie platforms like MySpace or Facebook.

Shortly afterwards, the entire app store was abolished. That too was tolerable. There was only crude stuff in it anyway. Completely understandable: Who wants to develop for a platform whose users are completely satisfied with already having everything they need with telephone, SMS, email and calendar?

As a fanboy, the end may make me sad, but for the company itself everything followed a major contingency plan: As early as 2016, CEO John Chen announced that the transition to a pure software company was complete. BlackBerry has since positioned itself as a cybersecurity company. The lead that Apple and Android devices had ahead of the first mover in the hardware sector was impossible to catch up.

BlackBerry was synonymous with Work Anywhere early on

Innovator’s dilemma, external disruption – Chen understood that. He then issued licenses to third-party companies so that they could build new devices with keyboards that ran on Android under the name BlackBerry. The result were uninteresting, uninspiring things that had screens that were way too big and whose keyboard could be hidden almost shamefully. Yuck.

But of course, Chen had the right nose, and the solid business development of BlackBerry since then proves it. He was also a turnaround CEO, not the biggest fan of the device. The honor goes to Jim Balsillie, the head behind the company RIM, which produced BlackBerry and brought in over 20 billion dollars a year at peak times – compared to Apple’s current sales, of course, all of the kid stuff. But Balsillie managed to make BlackBerry synonymous with Work Anywhere early on.

Balsillie managed something else as well: getting to the post of CEO as a slightly madman. For years he tried unsuccessfully to bring a professional NHL ice hockey team to the Canadian industrial city of Hamilton with his RIM billions, spoke to the Prime Minister several times and placed lobby ads in newspapers across the country. Balsillie roughly dreamed of the license deal, which Chen then implemented years later. He was a kind of Musk-Light long before Musk invented himself as technoking.

Small, light, laser focus on relevant communication

Balsillie once said that he would take his BlackBerry Bold 9900 with him to the grave because he had created the perfect gadget with the device. He was right: it really was pretty perfect. And now his device and its operating system are going to the grave in front of him. Sadface. For people who entered the working world in the noughties, it was the unofficial ID of the workforce. Finally slipped into adult disguise using a gadget. Finally a moneymaker.

The strange thing is: I firmly believe that there is a market for a device like the Bold 9900 right now. Small, light, laser focus on relevant communication. Which corporation doesn’t dream of a device for its employees that can do one thing – and only one thing – while on the move: simply work.

Not that there wasn’t a little glimmer of hope every now and then. For example when Kim Kardashian claimed a few years ago that she always had a few copies of the Bold 9900 lying around because she liked it that way. In stock! If nothing else could be done with her, here she was the sister in spirit. Or that Barack Obama was allegedly reluctant to part with the Bold 9900 – Hope!

Off to a well-deserved retirement

Hope must now come from others. For example from a US company called Onward Mobility. The Texas company actually wanted to bring a BlackBerry device onto the market in the summer of 2021. But not much has happened since the proclamations. You can still put yourself on a waiting list on the homepage, nothing more.

It’s also fitting that the crackberry.com fan blog announced a change of ownership yesterday. For the last almost 20 years, Crackberry has had a community of lovable tech yesterday comment and discuss every tiny fantasy message from the keypad phone cosmos. Now you want to reposition yourself. As what remains a secret.

Alright Slide your thumb once more over the wonderful Klicki-Klick keyboard and then off to a well-deserved retirement: as an artifact of a bygone world of work on my desk. Goodbye, BlackBerry. QWERTZ!

This article is at first Business punk appeared.

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