Concept in Definition ABC

That of mobile telephony is, if we talk about the companies that are in it, a cruel, ruthless world. And this is the story of one of these companies that went from the top, to be diluted in a fight for survival, something that not a few of the manufacturers and platforms that once meant something.

This is the story of BlackBerry, the company and the operating system namesake.

A classic that was revolutionary in the professional field

The company that we know today as BlackBerry was born as RIM (Research In Motion) in 1984 in Canada, the result of a private initiative in which the government Canadian as a public entity when considering the technology sector as strategic for the country, so it should have a specific business fabric.

Its first products were messaging terminals that worked on the incipient mobile telephone network, allowing to send and receive messages from text and subsequently emails. It is what was called at the time pager.

With the evolution

of the sector, pagers they were becoming smartphones keeping two signs of identity main: the first was the keyboard Physical QWERTY, while the second was the operating system.

Service email it also became one of the house brands. With its own servers that processed messages, BlackBerry's became the first service push in order to smartphones of the world.

Something that seems so common to us today as it is the mail that reaches our mobile instead of be we who have to load it when we want to consult it, it was utopian at the beginning of millennium. BlackBerry made it possible, and services quickly emerged that copied it, still taking time to deliver the same result to users.

The programs of administration both mail and business devices, and its instant messaging service, all linked to its own software platform, also gained prestige and users.

BlackBerry initially competed with Palm OS and later with Symbian, always maintaining more than noticeable market shares, probably over 25% of the volume of smartphones and an even more significant piece of software of corporate management.

Then the iPhone was introduced, Android arrived, and the tables turned.

The slow and inexorable decline

The Canadian company, renamed from RIM to BlackBerry in 2013 to better identify with its flagship product, failed to adapt to the times.

Although the brand's fans appreciated - and, in many cases, still appreciate - its keyboard physical, the public demanded full touch terminals, and the company was still slow to launch the his. And when it did, in addition to being late, it was at an excessive price.

BlackBerry's market share was falling steadily. The company made a bet on the future by acquiring QNX in 2010, and a year later it announced that its operating system would be based, in the future, on this platform, designed for real-time operations and that has found its niche in critical real-time tasks and in the sector motoring.

A tablet The Playbook (2013) also entered the company's plans, but its commercial failure forced it to withdraw it from stores and rethink its future.

At the same time, the still tough BlackBerry OS started running Android applications, something that had already been seen on the Playbook. It was his death sentence; Why would a developer want to release a version of a app for a minority and terminal operating system, if it could only do it for two majority platforms, one of which already worked on the BlackBerry?

The company launched its first Android terminal, the Priv, at the end of 2015, and its future is marked by the green robot operating system. Expensive and without more differential than improvements in the software integrating some products and services of the company that improve the safety, the Priv has not been as successful as expected.

There are still die-hard BlackBerry users, like US President Barack Obama, but the platform is already on its way. dead, and the company suffers serious market positioning problems that threaten its future, as it once did to Motorola.

Photos: iStock - tbradford / abalcazar

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