Merrill Cook
They weren’t called “crackberries” for nothing. But even though the rise to the top was meteoric, so was the fall. Welcome to one of the most competitive and quickly evolving industries on the planet. The original Blackberries were a bit like pagers with larger displays and tiny keyboards. They were revolutionary in the late 90’s, as one of the only ways to access and send email effectively from a phone, but now mobile online traffic is through the roof, and consumers are A LOT pickier. While Blackberry’s new Passport smartphone does offer more text per line, and more work space than many rivals, the key point here is that Blackberry went from being a central player in the smartphone game to a fringe player. All in little more than 10 years time. Blackberry has become leaner (they’ve trimmed headcount by about 60% in the past three years), and is working on several projects to lift themselves back into prominence, but they will have to do so from quite a distance behind Apple and Samsung in the current market.
