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In our region, BlackBerry phones have always been seen as a marvel, but in the West, it was an incredibly popular brand. The company has conquered 50% of the US market and 20% of the world and sold 50 million devices a year. In the middle of zero, nothing seemed to threaten Canadian society. But Canadians' plans violated Apple and Google: they broke into the smartphone market and started building their own orders. BlackBerry has long resisted and is still alive, but the return of positions and greatness is already an impossible task.
Search Paths
For a long time, the company had the most boring name that you could imagine: Research in Motion, or RIM in a simple way. It was founded by Michalis Lazaridis, the son of immigrants from Turkey to Canada. Children's enthusiasm for technology drove Michalis, who in the Western way began introducing himself to Mike, at the University of Waterloo, where the student studied electronics and electronics. l & # 39; computer.
In 1984, Mike, still a graduate student, won the first serious contract. And not just anyone, but General Motors himself. The automotive giant has ordered a network to be used in its factories and a 23-year-old student has been awarded a half-million dollar contract. It was about two months before graduation at the university, but by that time, Mike had clearly not understood the interest of the crust: he had dropped out of school.
The money received from General Motors has become the opening capital of Research in Motion. Mike was joined by a childhood friend, Douglas Fredgin. Case with the GM order went no matter what: the contract was finally broken and the founders of the company did not really understand what to do. After several unsuccessful developments, RIM decided to try itself the development of Mobitex technology, which subsequently glorified the future BlackBerry brand.
The Mobitex network was created by the Swedish company Televerket and was launched in 1986. The standard offers a high degree of protection and is ideally suited, for example, to the transfer of electronic mail. RIM, like other companies, saw an opportunity there. In Canada, we have started preparing the infrastructure for Mobitex, and pager manufacturers have already developed devices that are compatible with this standard.
IM gadget
Lazaridis decided to overtake everyone and, in 1996, he published Inter @ ctive Pager 900. Overall, this device would now be called a "messenger gadget": if the pagers were working to receive data, the device Inter @ ctive Pager 900 enabled full text communication by users. It looked like this:
Later, RIM launched a more practical and thoughtful device, the 950 model. Although it proved to be a more successful successor, it did not have much use of demand: in the second half of the 90s , the communication was usually vocal or long, while RIM 950 could not call. and writing extended messages on a small screen is not very practical.
At about the same time, RIM planned to create a memorable brand and turned to Lexicon Branding. The company, which develops the brands, found the keyboard buttons as blackberry bones – and that's how the BlackBerry name appeared.
RIM has developed a messaging service that, through its own BlackBerry Enterprise Server, processes and protects the data. This has determined BlackBerry's target audience – people who are at least concerned about the confidentiality of the information. That is, businessmen, operational service employees, celebrities. Behind them and ordinary users. RIM has finally improved: in 1999, the company even went public and, thanks to the sale of shares, it could have developed a full-fledged activity.
At the beginning of the new millennium, the BlackBerry brand still had pagers using the Mobitex network. Mobile phones were gradually ousting the usual pagers, but RIM products were still of a different type, although with the development of wireless Internet, they also had an inevitable end. However, in a sense, the September 11, 2001 attacks have helped businesses a lot. That day, New York was virtually free of mobile because of the profusion of calls, but relatively free Mobitex worked perfectly: victims could contact their relatives, emergency services being kept in touch via pagers. BlackBerry devices have proven themselves.
$ 612.5 million fine and mobile switchover
But the same year, RIM gets a serious trial. The US NTP, which patented the wireless letter transmission system, has accused Canadians of illegally using their designs. RIM has long been unlocked and has not acknowledged the violation, but the court has finally moved to the NTP side. Even worse, companies have been threatened with banning BlackBerry devices that use technology that infringes patents. It could destroy RIM. On the defense raised the US Department of Defense. The agency said that many government agencies are using BlackBerry products and that they can not be abandoned. As a result, RIM received a $ 612.5 million payment to NTP in 2006. At the same time, the company has gained time to develop services that do not violate competing patents.
Despite the success of the pagers, RIM understood that the phones would force such devices. In 2002, the company launched its first mobile phone – the BlackBerry 5810 model. However, it was impossible to call it a full-fledged phone: the terminal did not have a microphone or speaker. It has been proposed to make calls via the connection of a wired headset. RIM still focused on the transfer of textual information, but already via GPRS. Buyers were not happy with the model: at a price of $ 50,000, the device was not a full-fledged phone – it was not practical to connect a headset for each call.
RIM focused all of its devices on the enterprise segment: at that time, companies were buying communicators and other communications for their employees, and the protection of BlackBerry services inspired customers to trust the security of correspondence. . But little by little, the company decided to fully enter the consumer market. His mobile phones are invaded by color screens, cameras and music players. At the same time, RIM has retained an important feature: the QWERTY keyboard, which has become the hallmark of the brand. Things went well until 2007, when a new player appeared on the telephony market – Apple.
Again, the iPhone has ruined everything.
At first, they did not take the Cupertinians seriously: the iPhone was expensive ($ 500 for the basic version!), The lack of physical keyboard raised many questions and Apple had to fight in a new field dominated by Nokia , Samsung, BlackBerry, etc. Leave the first iPhone and was a very compromised device, but the direction for the development of smartphones, he asked more than clear. However, other manufacturers, including RIM, continued to resist.
Lazaridis in an openly scolded iPhone interview: "I could not and could not write on it, and many of my friends too. It's hard to write on a piece of glbad.. Surprisingly, in 2008, the BlackBerry Storm model came out with a virtual keyboard. The device was dropped by the operating system, which was manufactured according to the old principles and significantly lower than iOS. But the worst was not even the operating system – for an incredible reason, the smartphone lacked Wi-Fi.
Sales continued to hold: BlackBerry has quickly become one of the most popular mobile brands in the United States in the space of zero years, and the loyal public has continued to choose it. The company's smartphones are broadly divided into two branches: some models come out with push-button keypads, some other tactile trends.
Final fall
In 2011, the company launched a new product: the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. RIM bought the developer QNX Software for its QNX operating system, which formed the basis of the tablet's operating system. The system was developed with appalling haste and turned out to be raw: they did not even have time to add a native email client to the tablet version, the android apps supported were working slowly. PlayBook was waiting for the fate of the BlackBerry Storm: sales were weak and RIM even canceled the development of the second-generation terminal.
The years 2011-2013 have become the most unpleasant for RIM: they have almost completely missed the market. The mbad cuts have begun, the company has been renamed BlackBerry Limited and Lazaridis has stepped down from his position as executive director: the board of directors and himself understood that there were too many opportunities and a fresh look at the situation. John Chen, who has proposed to return to the business and services segment, is at the helm. The latest breakthrough on the smartphone market, whose company had already been completely ousted, dates back to 2013. The company introduced the new BlackBerry 10 operating system and the Q5, Q10 and Z10 terminals. Nothing good has yet come out, and then Chen has more than one idea in hand: try Android.
The BlackBerry Priv slider then appeared: the same QWERTY keyboard (with a touch-sensitive surface) was hidden under the sliding screen, which the BlackBerry could not refuse.
The phone looked promising: a folded screen around the edges (like in the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge), a 5.4-inch screen, 3GB of RAM, a Snapdragon 808 chip. But the device was rather slow in terms performance and unacceptable for the flagship product. At the same time, observers have noted that it was the best BlackBerry smartphone in recent years.
Now the company is almost part of the smartphone market and is focused on enterprise software. Sometimes devices turn off and there are models with a physical keyboard – apparently, some people like this format. But as a company, BlackBerry is no longer engaged in the development of phones: the Chinese company TCL produces smartphones under this brand. Now, BlackBerry is a software development company exclusively.
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