When BlackBerry controlled nearly half of the US smartphone market, its leaders saw the iPhone’s flaws clearly — and still missed the shift that would erase its lead

In 2009, Research In Motion looked almost impossible to dislodge. BlackBerry was not just a popular handset. It was the device that executives, lawyers, bankers, public officials, and road warriors trusted when mobile email still felt like infrastructure.

That year, NPD reported that RIM’s share of the US consumer smartphone market had risen to nearly half in the first quarter, helped by the BlackBerry Curve and carrier promotions. By January 2010, Comscore still had RIM leading US smartphone platforms with 43 percent of subscribers.

Inside BlackBerry’s world, the iPhone looked impressive but incomplete. It had a glass screen, a weak digital keyboard, short battery life, and none of the enterprise trust that made BlackBerry indispensable to corporations and governments.

The company’s mistake was not that its leaders saw nothing. It was that they saw the iPhone’s early flaws so clearly that they missed what customers were about to value more.

The flaw BlackBerry understood too well

Co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie were not blind to the iPhone. Lazaridis, an electrical engineer who had built RIM from a small Waterloo company into a global mobile power, understood that Apple had done something technically ambitious.

But BlackBerry’s senior circle judged the iPhone through the market they already owned. A Macworld account, citing an excerpt from the 2015 book Losing the Signal, quoted Lazaridis lieutenant Larry Conlee saying the iPhone “wasn’t a threat to RIM’s core business” because it was not secure, drained battery quickly, and had a poor digital keyboard.

Those objections made sense in 2007. The first iPhone could not send picture messages. It did not run on 3G. It lacked the enterprise management stack that IT departments expected. For people who wrote hundreds of emails a day, a physical keyboard still felt faster and safer.

BlackBerry was not selling a phone in the ordinary sense. It was selling a system: secure messaging, push email, corporate control, carrier relationships, and the confidence that a message sent from an airport lounge would actually arrive.

How a correct answer becomes a fatal one

The trap BlackBerry fell into is common in successful companies. When an existing strategy is generating record revenue, every internal signal rewards doubling down.

Engineers who question the keyboard sound impractical. Product managers who push touchscreens sound distracted. Customers, when asked what they want, ask for a better version of the tool they already use.

This is the classic Henry Ford problem. Ask people in 1900 what they want, and they are likely to describe faster horses. Ask BlackBerry’s enterprise customers in 2009 what they want, and they ask for longer battery life, a better trackball, and tighter Exchange integration.

BlackBerry kept improving the world it understood. Meanwhile, the next smartphone market was being defined by people who wanted cameras, music, web browsing, apps, maps, games, photos, and casual messaging on one glass screen.

The workforce consequences are familiar too. Once employees stop believing leadership can read the environment, the people most capable of leading a pivot often leave or disengage. In a fast-moving category, losing belief can be as damaging as losing market share.

The cognitive biases hiding in the boardroom

Filipa Monteiro Martins, a renewables innovation manager at Galp, has written in pv magazine about how cognitive biases like groupthink are more likely to occur in identical teams, and how diverse leadership groups are more likely to report market-share growth. Her observation was made about renewable energy, but the business pattern travels easily.

BlackBerry’s senior leadership came from a telecommunications and engineering culture that had been rewarded for solving hard enterprise problems. That background was a strength until the market began rewarding different instincts.

Three biases show up repeatedly in corporate failures of this kind. Confirmation bias makes leaders weigh evidence that supports the existing strategy more heavily than evidence against it. Sunk-cost reasoning makes a pivot feel like an admission that years of investment were wasted. Availability bias makes past victories feel more predictive than they really are.

BlackBerry had been right about earlier mobile rivals. It had beaten or outlasted products that could not match its reliability, security, or keyboard efficiency. Each correct call made the next one harder to question.

The numbers behind the fall

The market data compresses the story. In the first quarter of 2009, NPD said RIM’s share of the US consumer smartphone market was nearly 50 percent. In January 2010, Comscore reported that RIM held 43 percent of US smartphone subscribers, ahead of Apple and far ahead of Google’s Android.

But Android was already accelerating. In 2010, global smartphone shipments hit 302 million, a 71 percent jump over 2009, and Android was capturing much of the new growth.

By November 2012, Comscore data cited by Investopedia put BlackBerry’s US market share at 7.3 percent, with Google and Apple far ahead. By 2016, BlackBerry had stopped making its own handsets and moved toward software and security services.

Compare that to where the market sits now. According to Counterpoint Research data on 2025 global shipments, Apple led worldwide shipments, Samsung followed closely, and Chinese manufacturers split much of the rest.

The category BlackBerry once defined, the enterprise-secure keyboard communicator, no longer exists as a meaningful hardware segment. Its old strengths were absorbed into software, device-management tools, encrypted messaging apps, and enterprise APIs on the same touchscreens BlackBerry once underestimated.

What the collapse teaches anyone making big bets

The BlackBerry story is often told as a warning about touchscreens, but the deeper lesson is about how organizations evaluate disruption. A threat can look weak when measured against yesterday’s most important criteria.

The iPhone was weaker than BlackBerry in ways that mattered to BlackBerry’s existing customers. The problem was that the next market was not going to be decided only by those customers.

That is where the broader idea behind the resilience paradox is useful as a business metaphor. Systems that are tightly adapted to current conditions can become fragile when the environment changes faster than the system can reorient.

BlackBerry was, by 2009, almost perfectly adapted to a world that was already disappearing. It had the right network, the right keyboard, the right security reputation, and the right enterprise sales motion. Then the basis of competition changed.

The same pattern keeps reappearing. Kodak understood film. Blockbuster understood store traffic. Nokia understood global handset distribution. Incumbents are rarely lazy or uninformed. More often, they are running the right playbook for the market they built, while a new market forms just outside their field of view.

What survives, and what gets replaced

The ironies pile up. The secure messaging BlackBerry built its enterprise reputation on now runs through apps and managed services on iPhones and Android devices. The physical keyboard survives as nostalgia, occasionally bolted onto niche handsets for people who still miss typing by feel.

The customers BlackBerry defended so fiercely changed too. Lawyers, executives, regulators, and government officials now carry touchscreens. The same people who once said they could never give up the keyboard eventually did, because the rest of their lives had moved onto the glass.

The lesson is uncomfortable because BlackBerry’s leaders were not foolish. Their technical objections were often reasonable. Their customers really did value security, battery life, and fast typing. Their product really did work.

But the question changed. The market stopped asking which device was best for corporate email and started asking which device could become the center of a person’s entire digital life.

BlackBerry answered the old question with extraordinary competence. Apple and Android answered the new one. That is why the smartest people in the building can still lose when the building itself is no longer where the future is being made.