MUSEUM OF THE FALLEN
Dominance is not eternal.
The Wall/ Lost Technology/ The BlackBerry
A BlackBerry KEYone smartphone, showing the brand's signature physical QWERTY keyboard below the touchscreen.

Steven H. Keys, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 4.0

Lost Technology

The BlackBerry

1999 CE 2022 CE

The thumb-typed king of corporate email that ruled boardrooms until the touchscreen took its crown.

Born
1999 CE
Died
2022 CE
Lived
23 years
Dead for
4 yrs
At its peak
~85 million subscribers at its 2012 peak
Cause of death
Replaced
Replaced by
The iPhone and Android smartphones
The Obituary

Research In Motion’s BlackBerry turned a two-way pager into the device that put corporate email in every executive’s hand. From 1999 it offered secure push email, a tactile QWERTY keyboard, and BBM messaging, and by 2012 it had around 85 million subscribers. The 2007 iPhone changed what a phone should be, and BlackBerry’s late, awkward pivot to touchscreens and its own BB10 OS failed. The company quit making phones in 2016 and shut down services for legacy devices in January 2022.

Worth remembering

  • Its physical QWERTY keyboard let executives thumb out email faster than anyone could on glass.
  • The phrase 'CrackBerry' captured how addictive its blinking message light became.

Sources

  1. RIM introduced the BlackBerry in 1999; it dominated enterprise push email Wikipedia
  2. BlackBerry ended support for legacy BlackBerry OS devices on January 4, 2022 Wikipedia

A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.

Buried nearby
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Bethlehem Steel
1857 CE — 2003 CE
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Blockbuster
1985 CE — 2010 CE
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Knickerbocker Trust Company
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